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Hardware Manufacturers Gouging Customers
rahlquist writes "An article over at infoworld discusses that buying that used router on ebay may not be a good deal if Cisco can find its way to screwing you. What's next, buy a used Ford and pay Ford to transfer the license for the onboard computer's OS or face piracy charges if you continue to drive?"
The bad news is that they are violating the gpl. :( I even submitted a /. article that is still pending after 2 days trying to deal with this. I need to recompile the kernel on one of the units I bought from them, but they won't release the kernel sources to me. *sigh*
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
At the rate that hardware becomes outdated, what benifit do they think they would have screwing their customers out of trying to recoup some of their costs?
Not to mention that every time I sell old hardware, it is for the express purpose of purchasing new hardware. Everyone wins.
So a NetApp storage system is two separate pieces, the hardware and the software. If I decide to sell my old NetApp, does this mean I can sell the hardware to someone, and the software to someone else? That doesn't sound like something that NetApp would like.
Vote for global prefs bug
What's next, buy a used Ford and pay Ford to transfer the license for the onboard computer's OS or face piracy charges if you continue to drive? don't give them any ideas
Someone owns a whole bunch of Cisco routers or other miscellaneous equipment. Once the equipment is no longer needed, they retain the license to the software while selling the hardware to someone else. Cisco rep complains, new hardware owner says "talk to the software licensee". When purchasing maintenance agreements and such, the hardware owner pays off the software licensee the cost of the maintenance agreement plus a small surcharge, and the software licensee pays Cisco the amount on Cisco's price list for the maintenance agreement.
The terms of the license agreement are fulfilled - it's just that the on-site location is changed.
"$15,000 is still a good deal... If the ownership of a system changes, our contract says the software has to be relicensed."
If I give up my ownership, do I get my $15K back? Something tells me no.
When companies get greedy like this, it's all I can do to keep my calm. I'm not sure I agree that all information wants to be free, but used sofware licenses that are bound to hardware that is changing hands sure do.
The CB App. What's your 20?
hate to say it, but you gotta know what you're buying. both used and new. maybe it will awaken some eyes to open source/open standards, what have you, but if you buy something you need to know if you can resell it (as opposed to a leasing, or trading in with the manufacturer), if that is your plan.
as a side note, my father worked for pitney bowes (they sell shipping,mailing, and postage systems) for many years. they did the same with their shipping systems and software. of course, most old PB systems got traded in for newer systems, there were few in the 2nd hand market. so it's not just in the IT world.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
One thing they don't discuss in the article, but which I think would be legal, would be to permanently lease your equipment rather than sell it on eBay.
E.g. Used router for sale - $ 400
versus Used router for lease - $ 400 first month, $0 each additional month.
If you really need service contracts negotiated through me, then I do it for you at a reasonable hourly rate for my inconvenience.
I bought an 831 new (so I have the license for it) back in June. After reading about the recent vulnerablility I contacted Cisco to get an updated IOS version. I thought it would be a simple process, considering some of the comments I read here. I recieved an email back from them telling me if I wanted it fixed, I would have to purchase a SmartNet contract. That was July 18, and I am still running a vulnerable version using the ACL workaround.
Surely you mean:
FREEZE! HANDS UP! This is the BSA! We know you have illegal routers that you bought 100% legally. We are coming in, and want everyone to lie flat on the ground away from the routers. Comply and no one gets hurt (well financially everybody except us gets hurt).
No?!?
If people can't be bothered to READ a contract before signing it I can't be bothered to care.
I do read that sort of thing and that is why I will only buy from scum like Cisco if I have no other choice. And I usually do.
You can buy sync serial cards on the open market you know.
As for non-transferability, BS. They can probably refuse to sell a service contract on the used equip, perhaps even deny you updates. But "going after" you for possessing/using a piece of used equip would never stand in court. Doctrine of first sale allows copyrighted works to be sold by their rightful owner and EULAs are only valid in Virgina. So unless you have an actual contract with a company that specifically says you can't bring in a used box you are clear, and any such clause probably wouldn't stand in court if you were willing to spend the money to fight it. (i.e. one unit from eBay isn't worth a fight, 1,000 from an acquisition probably is.)
Democrat delenda est
If you sell your used hardware to someone, then from the corporate viewpoint, YOU are depriving them of their right to sell NEW hardware to that person, hence you are infringing on the rights of a corporation !?! Lordie this country is hosed in the head....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This makes perfect sense for the hardware companies, when you buy a high end router, you aren't paying just for the box, the metal, and the wires, but also for the IOS
,the wheels and the engine,but also for the software which controls the engine.
When you buy a Ford you don't just pay for the doors, the roof
So that does also make pefect sense to you?
For me not being allowed to transfer a software license still doesn't make sense.
We bought an EMC SAN from a bankruptcy auction of a failed telecom.
We payed $5k for the unit (bid price), which came to probaly about twice that once all was said and done.
EMC wanted some obsene amount of money to license us the software to boot the puppy up, so it sat in from of our datacenter for a few months. Then a sister division bought started looking into an IBM Shark for their datacenter that we would be using part of. Rumor is IBM gave us a $200k discount on the shark for the trade in of our EMC unit.
So we made off with $190k from the deal! (kind of) Not a bad profit after our horror of EMC's license cost!
To top it off, the EMC has been sitting in front of our datacenter for an addition 6 months or so. I fegure they don't even want the unit. They just didn't want us using it.
That's my interesting experience with this.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
during the recent Big bug, I went around to all my routers, all of them used. I requested the top IOS with the best feature set for what we use each router, for each and every router, and know what? Cisco gave me .bin files for all of them. Since these came directly from Cisco, aren't these now arguably licensed?
But since you are required to pay for a support contract to get these updates, it is clear that the firmware is a separate product, even though it is delivered with the device, and the device will not operate without it. Note that many companies do not operate this way - these days you can download drivers for free for any PC you might purchase, via the internet. Even before the WWW became interesting for commercial purposes, you could generally call up their tech support, send them some money or make a credit card payment, and get the drivers shipped to you for a few bucks to cover a floppy (At the time, a not-inconsiderable amount of money when repeated frequently) and postage.
Therefore, since you must pay for updates to the software, a given update becomes almost an item of physical property. You have paid for it, and the right to use it. Hence, when transferring the device to the next owner, they should take ownership of that instance of that version of the code. It should not be considered simply "licensed" to them. After all, you paid for it, not just in some vague way by purchasing the device, but through the purchase of a support contract which is generally the only way to legally get access to these firmware images. Therefore, you should be able to transfer it, or your license to it, or whatever language you would like to use for the same thing here.
I should think it would be quite sufficient for the new owner to purchase a support contract and pick up. The answer to this "problem" is not relicensing fees, it's end-of-life. At EOL for a given product, current owners of the product should be able to purchase support for some given number of years, or commit to purchasing it, at a given price, and you will know how long you have to support the product. I think it's best to also commit to supporting the device at the current rate. As the device gets older, it will become less expensive to support, because more of the issues will be "known", and after end of life, you can refuse to add new features to the device without someone specifically paying you consulting fees for development.
This way, there is a finite lifetime to a product, you maintain your support costs, and let's face it; If someone has a support contract you will provide installation support to them as many times as they would like to move and reinstall it; This is really the only possible way to excuse charging anyone ANYTHING more than the recurring fees of the support contract when they purchase and employ a used device. If a company purchased an entire other company's assets, then necessarily their firmware licenses would come with it. Why, then, is it reasonable to charge a relicensing fee when someone purchases used hardware? It is not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some net app boxes are nothing but Dell servers in disgise :) i have converted many of them to realy nice dual cpu 64bit pci file servers running linux with hardware raid
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
I remember the s/36 and as/400 market place, in that the OS was licensed, and didn't transfer with the hardware. You always had to license the SW from IBM for the going list price.
With software, that is licensed, the rules are what ever the license agreement is.
Microsoft is doing the same thing, in that the software isn't a product seperate from the HW as well any more.
"Tague and others think the manufacturers' restrictions are just not right. "It's a flat out scam," he says. "Just because it's typical, just because the other guys are doing it too, doesn't mean it's OK."
How is it, in a nation where it is the will of the people that is to be represented and reflected in our laws and statues, our laws and statues reflect not the will of the people, but the will of an elite minority?
What more evidence do we need than this that ours is not a government by the people, for the people, but instead a government by those who have power, for those who already have it?
These businesses and corporations exist, and may operate only as we permit them to; they are by our permission.
We must revoke their permission. We must revoke their permission to buy laws which ensure their profit margins. We must revoke their permission to buy laws which mandate revenue where there ought not to be any.
What was it that the Justice Department lawyers told us, and the technology lobyist told us in their interviews; that it is naive, uninformed, and probably just childish of us to suggest that our government is in the pockets of corporations, and that corporations can "buy laws"?
What I say to them is that it is they who are naive. The corporate interests of today do not need to buy a single new law to oppress us, to wrong us, and to devestate us.
They do not, because our laws, our resources, our nation, were bought and sold to corporate interests long before any one of us were even born.
We are born into chains and we die under their weight.
If you struggle, it only drives those in power to bind us all the tighter. And they grin in delight. And they swim in their gold. And they build the flames higher.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
It's the seller fault for not telling the buyer about this. The seller originally agreed to the license, and should have pointed out the extra charge on eBay before bidders began bidding. A real estate lender has to do this before you apply for a loan. It's called a Good Faith Estimate, and it spells out the charges other than the monthly mortgage.
Go after the seller, not Cisco.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I was looking for a used SOHO series router on eBay, but I think I'm better off building a small Linux router and using something like Freesco instead.
I know I'm small potatoes in context to the article, but I wonder how many other large organizations, after having a experience simimlar to Mr. Tague's, will take a long hard look at a Linux based solution?
Their practices appear to violate the doctrine of first sale, which the Supreme Court has been found to heavily favor in the past. The parts of the agreement that govern the non-transferablility of the license could be invalidated if this were ever challenged in court. I think it would only take one lawsuit from a large corporation like a bank to take care of these prohibitive licensing terms. In the past, portions of contracts and complete contracts have even been invalidated because of terms that were not binding due to laws forbidding them. This could just be one of many of those.
IANAL (yet) but unless the guy selling the equipment on EBay signed a contract agreeing not to resell the equipment or software, First Sale applies here (First Sale = It's ok to sell the copyrighted thing you legally acquired). The one caveat is if the seller lives in a state where UCITA has been enacted, in which case he is bound by the shrinkwrap license agreement inlcuded with the software. So chances are the buyer got a nice router on the cheap that he can legally use as is which is what you would expect when buying something from EBay.
Unfortunately, the poor buyer is still screwed for the maintenance contract because Cisco can refuse to do business with him for just about any reason under the sun. This is one of the big caveats when you buy directly from corporations and not through retail outlets. You may get a cheaper price up front but those tricky Corps will make you sign all sorts of invasive/restrictive contracts to lock you in to their wares.
My advice is to buy all of the used hardware/software you want from EBay, just don't go expecting Uber Corps to help you out afterwards.
X
Double taxation.
Not so. The car is not taxed, the sale of the car is taxed. When you bought the car, you paid a tax based on the value of the transaction. When you sold the car, the purchaser paid a tax based on the value of that transaction. Two separate transactions, two separate tax payments.
You are taxed on your paycheck and then when you invest your money and it generates income it is taxed again.
double taxation.
Wildly not so. You are taxed on your paycheck, then you are taxed on the income that your investment earned. The same money is not taxed twice. In fact, to a certain extent, if your investment results in a loss, you can exclude the amount of that loss from your taxable income.
I think that you would be hard pressed to find a situation where you paid the same tax twice for the same thing. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist...just fleetingly rare.
-h-
I am not a lawyer. I am not an accountant. I am not an economist. I am an engineer.
I purchased a 1601 off ebay, two days before the IOS vulnerability. I called them that day, told the rep I'd purchased the router from ebay and had no service contract. He asked me what version of IOS I needed, and I had a new patch that day. He even helped me install it, and got me a different version when that one didn't work. He never once tried to shake me down.
You could kinda understand it if the company charging through the nose made generic software that could run on a number of platforms. But your average company ain't going to go buy a router on eBay just to get hold of a certain version of IOS to run on their XBox. Likewise, a Cisco router cannot be run on Linux (though SCO are probably trying to work out if any parts of their valuable IP is in IOS in case you happen to have more than one ASIC!).
The hardware is useless without the software, and vice versa. It should be treated as one product.
This simply strikes of sheer extortion. Nothing more, nothing less, and Cisco et al should be taken to task, legally if needs be, for it.
--sanx--
Windows Tweaks
This isn't like Gamer PCs, where you _need_ a 4.77 GHz machine to keep up, or a Microsoft Office machine, where MS keeps making Office bigger and using the newer features of Windows, so you need to upgrade Windows, but you can't upgrade to Windows 2006 without upgrading to at least a 2GHz machine with 6.40GB of RAM. This is much more like the 486 Linux machine sitting in the corner acting as a DNS and DHCP server, or the Pentium 133 you're using as an X terminal.
But there are two popular reasons to sell a used router. One is that you're upgrading to a bigger router, and as you say, everyone wins including the router vendor. The other reason is that your dot-com died (or was bought by somebody who already had enough bandwidth in their offices) and you're selling the routers, the PCs, the chairs, the cubicle walls, and the t-shirts, and nobody's buying any new router except your happy E-Bay customer, and the router vendor loses a sale they might have gotten.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The OS in your car is embedded Linux, so you owe SCO $699 even if you bought the car new.
It is a pattern of magnetic domains on a hard disk, or pits on a CD-ROM.
Why is that any less physical than the rest of the hardware?
Now, some may argue that "software" is different because it can more easily be copied than the rest of the hardware.
Here is a thought experiment:
If tomorrow, someone invented a "matter duplicator" that could duplicate any item, then could CISCO have a EULA for the hardware as well?
Does this make any sense?
I think that so-called "software" should be treated no differently than any other hardware; i.e., there should be reasonable protections against making copies of it (copyrights/patents), but that one should be able to resell what one buys.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
It's all about blame and expectations.
People expect Cisco to be good. After all, it's Cisco. They've been making good stuff for years. So when something goes wrong, it's an anomaly.
On the other hand, when the new router from the new company that they've never heard of before has a problem, that's 100% failure to them.
Suppose you have 100 machines with 100 IBM hard drives and they've been working for 5 years and 2 drives crash hard today.
You wouldn't get a bad opinion of IBM hard drives from that.
Now, suppose you swap in two drives from some company you've never heard of before and BOTH those drives crash hard within 48 hours.
Would you ever buy another from that company?
Not if you're the average person.
Despite the fact that IBM and that company might have the exact same failure rate on their drives.
That's why it is so important for new companies to spend money on customer relationships. Quickly exchange hardware while charging LESS for the equipment than the established companies. Which means you have lower profits.
I'm surprised that since the object for Cisco is to prevent the resale of their routers, and this "relicensing" affront to the first sale doctrine is just a smokescreen, that they haven't pulled a Microsoft, joined eBay's "Verified Rights Owner" program and started killing any auction that contained the word "Cisco."
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
They have to play by US law. Now they could, of course, just stop selling stuff here and there'd be little anyone could do about it. However a US court can exert control over them so long as they have a US arm of operations. This is how the EU can exert control over Microsoft, despite it being a US company. They do bussiness in the EU and hence are subject to the laws of member nations if the wish to continue to to bussiness there.
So I buy a bunch of Cisco stuff. Since the software can't be transferred, and the hardware will end up costing the buyer as much as, or more than, new equipment, all this new Cisco stuff immediately is worth $0 on the open market. Now according to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principals) assets are valued at the lower of cost or market. So these assets are now worth $0. Instant depreciation, and I get to write off the entire cost of the hardware and software as a business expense during one year, instead of spreading the cost out over five years or so.
I Wonder what the IRS will say when somebody tries this?
Latvia will be part of European Union next spring. Europeans laws are decent ones, and they will apply to Latvia as soon as it joins the EU. That case is not as desperate as it sounds. Don't give up!
Take an old clunker, two nics and go to
http://smoothwall.org/beta/
and download the latest package, smoothwall 2.0 Orient.
It's free. It works. You can find clunkers everywhere for free.
I refurb old clunkers and load smoothy on them.
I resell them and make a few $$$ for my pocket,
keep stuff out of the land fill and make some
customer very happy for saving them BIG $$$$....
So are they all winking at each other, and tacitly agreeing to screw the customer this way?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
That is why most states have a Sale of Goods Act. Before you submit to this kind of bullying, see a lawyer.
Oh well, what the hell...
I get sun workstations on ebay, the price is right and I enjoy using these boxes.
One can download solaris for free from sun, as well as patches, drivers, ect.
This may be bad news, they might decide to ditch the free download eventually. that would really.. suck.
I would not buy a cisco product. get a wan card and a linux box. your probably better off.
just my $0.02
Every time you purchase such restricted hardware, spin off a new Corporation.
Cisco Router Model X SN#12039okaj0123iasj Inc.
When you sell off the equipment, sell off the company. The software is licensed to that corporation. No need to relicense.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
is the fault of idiots... idiots who are willing to agree to such licensing terms. If customers would just grow some gonads and say "NO," then these terms would never come into existence.
We live in a market economy - the Windows license got so bad becuase everyone accepted it. Cisco can charge more to relicense an O/S than they charge for a new router because idiots will pay it, or buy another Cisco router (!).
We have three fundamental problems:
1) People don't read anymore.
2) Most people, thanks to our wonderful public education system, are functionally illiterate and wouldn't be able to understand a license written in legalese if they _did_ read it.
3) people think that one maker of a commodity makes better widgets than another maker of that commodity. This is a complete fallacy.
A while back I was "inspecting" (read: opening up) some networking equipment and found that of four 8-port COTS switches, three of them used the EXACT SAME design. There were only very minor layout changes - but the BOM was the same (mostly because the IC vendors issue reference designs).
We need to get off this notion that things we buy are different from other things and realize that all of this garbage is just commodity. Buy on terms, not on names or price.
In Statistics 101, you hear about the "sample size". The sample size relates to the confidence interval, which is a range of values you expect the actual value to be. In this case, the actual value is the failure rate of all IBM or Company X drives, not just the ones you tested. With a hundred samples, your confidence interval is going to very small, meaning that your estimate is probably very close to the actual value. With only two samples, the confidence interval is going to be very wide, because you can't be sure it's not a fluke.
When you bring a time-scale into it, you either have to measure the failure rate over the same time period, or measure the mean time between failure (MTBF), which is more informative. Technically, in the scenario given, 100% of Company X drives did fail within the same period that IBM's drives were being tested. If they fail in the first five minutes or in the last five minutes of those five years, they still failed. But again, with a sample size that low, you can't use that to reach any kind of conclusion.
However, if you measure the MTBF, even with a small sample size, I think you can say with reasonable confidence that the MTBF of the IBM drives is higher than Company X's, simply because the wide confidence interval (the region of uncertainty) of Company X's MTBF still wouldn't quite make it out to five years.
Of course, none of this takes into consideration the fact that IBM's drives aren't made by IBM anymore, and that (from the words of an ex-IBM engineer) Hitachi doesn't know how to make hard drives worth shit.
** begin rambling **
I believe cisco gets bashed too much by the linux/open-source community. While the particular incident in this article certainly deserves condemnation, it is far from typical of the cisco experience. If we go incessently after even the best of the proprietery software/hardware companies on every little point, how does that improve the image of Linux/Open Source?
My experience with cisco:
- as a system administrator in NY in the mid 90's I was suddenly placed in charge of several cisco routers handling t-1 uplinks for a small corporate datacenter. I called up Cisco, explained that I knew nothing about the equipment but I wanted to make sure I could responsibly manage them - they sent out about 3,000 pages of documentation across 10 bound volumes overnight at no charge and informed me that since at least one of the routers was under support contract, I could call them on regarding router anytime if an issue occured. I studied those manuals for a year or two and developed substantial expertise eventually getting various certifications and becoming a cisco reseller.
When I later switched to one company and then another, I purchased more cisco equipment. In the 10 years since, I've probably managed 50+ cisco routers and switches from the 800 to 7500 series and never has one failed on me in a way that I didn't think Cisco handled it well. And, given the quality and reliability of the equipment, I've never felt that I've had to overpay.
When a problem occurs that neither I or other network engineers can handle, we call up Cisco and are connected to a senior engineer there within 5-10 minutes and they have someone stay online to keep working on the problem - even if it takes 3 8hr shifts of their staff. They provide this quality of support as long as you have a single support contract with them. On their low end routers, the support contracts are only a hundred bucks or so. I can't imagine a linux sysadmin team providing that support for the price.
Furthermore, as long as you have one support contract, their entire support database is available online 24/7 including all software updates. Yes, I try to have smartnet contracts for all my equipment and my customers, but its nice to know that I never have to worry about getting these updates.
Furthermore, there are constant improvements to the software and daily emails with updates on every change to the product lines, software releases, and documentation.
The low end hardware is cheaper than setting up a dedicated pc system and the high end software just can't be matched with Linux yet (although I am a major linux fan and have deployed nearly 700 linux servers). I've funded some efforts at different companies to replace cisco firewalls with Linux systems, none of them was ever so convincing to me that I wouldn't feel more comfortable trusting my customers to Cisco - although the PIX line sucks(consequently the funding). The only area where I think Linux totally outperforms Cisco on the network engineering level is in loadbalancers, LVS and Heartbeat totally rock over the arrowpoint and localdirector generation of products.
I'd really feel more comfortable if the open source community showed more appreciation for the technical companies (even the proprietary ones) that really try to get things right. It would show more class. Eventually, I'm sure, we will have open-source products that compete extremely well with Cisco,
But given there are so many companies with shoddy products that overcharge their customers, it really isn't worth our time to keep bashing cisco now?
In my mind, Sun is 100-1000 times worse - you can't even justify the pricing difference, let alone the incompatibilities and the lack of innovation in their products. And, most of the complaints about Cisco are from sysadmins who really haven't taken enough time to try to understand the Cisco system or even get a simple basic support contract from them. Cisco is different, it's not bad...
** end rambling **
Did you read the article? This isn't a router from Best Buy we're talking about here. It's resales (most likely from bankruptcy settlements) of high end networking equipment - the list price of one of the items is 60 grand. The guy got it for 4.
Considering the downturn in the telecom market, I'd think that some of these companies would at least be willing to make new customers with some reasonable terms rather than piss them off. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the downturn happened in the first place.
Godspeed to the developers of alternative OSes for this hardware.
Typical answer for a realestate agent, however the problem is software license, is it for the customer or the unit? If the software license agreement is non-transferable then there is the problem. Obviously companies like Cisco are hurting and putting the hit on internet companies so the can improve their cash flow. Non transferable software agreements are very questionable and I believe their validity needs a court challenge. In this case I think Cisco and the like will lose, this is clearly a case of purchasing property, so that when this property is sold the software can come with, you could do that with MS windows, in fact up until Win XP this was common, used computers stores would sell your computer with your copy of Windows as long as you provided the original disk and key code. No this is a case of dot com gouging it does not come close to being legitimate. How can you prove that the seller knew that the software was a non resaleble item. Most likely they just thought it was their copy of the software, and thought it was fine to sell it. I am sure that Cisco did not go out of their way to inform the original customer about this rediculous and legally questionable restriction.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
The dot-bomb burst was especially nasty for Cisco. Sure, it was the beginning of an economic slump. And that meant customers were more likely to hold on to their funds "just in case" than shell out for networking gear - even if they could afford too. But it went further than that.
All these failed dot-coms meant there was a very large supply of premium Cisco network kit available for pennies on the dollar. Sales of this used gear directly competed against new sales. Not only was Cisco facing customers not willing to spend, but those who would be willing to spend would not neccissarily mean the sales Cisco desperately needed in these hard times.
The added twist to all this was that a good amount of that gear being auctioned off and competing directly with Cisco for hardware sales had been financed by Cisco. That's right. The used equipment that was competing with Cisco for sales hadn't actually made Cisco any real money to begin with.
I suspect there were individuals within Cisco challenged to "do something" about this situation.
Of course, it's a shame that Cisco is doing this. It may keep some strategists their jobs. It might act as a bulwark against loss of desperately needed sales. But it will cost Cisco good will of their customer base. And with the loss of good will, Cisco will eventually lose sales.
The vast majority of corporations out there have only one myopic goal in mind: Make More Money. They will pollute any river, strip any forest, injure or kill any worker or customer to further their mission. Basicly corporations are thinking "Fuck everyone and the magic hand of Adam Smith will save us". Unless better laws are created to protect the individual's rights in contracts, corporations will continue to screw any one they want.
I know,"Don't like the contact? Don't sign it." What happens when every new car dealer starts this or all the supermarkets require you use their "customer card" to buy from them. The RIAA would like to ban used CD sales. An EULA on all CDs would fix their problem nicely. The Magnuson-Moss Act needs to be revised to allow owner's rights to be transferred to subsequent owners and new laws are needed to heavily restrict conditions manufacturers place on goods during the sale. Of course this will never happen with all the money whores in Congress.
Can some say when the erosion of our rights will stop? I can't.
Welcome to Amerika.
pherris
(Oops, almost forgot: "Screw Flanders, screw Flanders, screw Flanders.")
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Go ask your company accountant about what an asset is worth if it can't be resold for its intended purpose. What this means is that expensive cisco grear that is being deprecated over 5 years is fraud (the kind your CEO can get thrown in jail for). The device only has scrap value once you open the box so it must be deprecated in one tax year. What does this make MCI worth seeing how much cisco gear they own and no one in their right mind would buy all of them.
This is just an example of the way things work in IT. i.e. the vendor lock-in.
I've seen phone systems like this. You buy the hard ware and there are cards giving lines which have to be activated individually.
So there is custom firmware or an OS per line/port that needs to be paid for before use.
-Kastor
A friend of mine had some dealings with a sleazy company in Montreal that tried to screw him by attempting to steal his work and then telling the police that he stole their work, leading to his arrest. They tried to complete the project using their IBM AS/400 computer. He knew that the OS on their computer was pirated, so he snitched to IBM.
These guys were in the business of buying and selling used IBM equipment. So IBM investigated, and discovered that a lot of the computers they sold had copies of the pirated OS. Seems they were buying the hardware without OS licenses. I don't know if that's because the original sellers had restrictions on selling the licenses, or just that they had transferred the licenses to other machines that they owned. But the upshot was that IBM started contacting the customers of this company, then started demanding license fees. Naturally, the companies were pissed at the sleazy sellers, since they assumed they were buying legit systems.
Ultimately, my friend was acquitted, and the sleazeballs went belly-up.
Once again the Slashdot reaction is totally off base. No wonder SCO and Microsoft have so much trouble taking this crowd seriously.
From the article:
"...when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system."
Two key words there: maintenance agreement.
First you have to remember that nobody is REQUIRED to provide that service. If you come to me and ask me to provide a service then I'm going to tell you what I will do and how much I want for it. If you don't like it then you can look elsewhere.
Anything else would be the same as you holding a gun to my head and forcing me to provide the service on your terms. That certainly isn't a fair business deal.
So you want to compare this to a Ford. Fine. Go get yourself a 96 Ford Contour with 100,000 miles on it from someone advertising in the local classifieds. Then drive or tow the thing down to your local Ford dealer and demand that they sell you a maintenance agreement for the same price as a current production model.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Oh, you're back? Where's the car? Lemme guess, the guys at the dealership ended up pissing themselves from laughing so hard.
Maybe you should try again. Got that old Compaq 386 laptop out in the garage? Give Compaq/HP a call right now and tell them you want a 5 year maintenance agreement on the damn thing and you're not paying a penny more than $500 for it.
It must be because these are all corporations, right? We all know that anyone trying to do business and make a living is evil.
How about you? Would you want to operate the way Michael Tague expects?
Somehow I don't think that Mr. Tague would do business this way either if he were on the other side.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Umm, the article talks about an unspecified model netapp and a cisco 2611. Depending on model and configuration, the netapp could be in the 60k$ range, but not a 2611.
That being said, the NetApp is not worth the cost, esp. in today's world. It's a nice device, but easily reproduced in many ways for orders of magnitude less. In the current environment, equipment is replaced every few years. So, the investment in NetApp gear that will physically last decades is useless. And it's made worse by changes in storage requirements.
For routers, mid- and high-end router hardware is expensive brand new and has zero parallel in the cheap, build-it-yourself arena. Once your needs go beyond T1 speed WAN links or you need to run a real routing protocol, you've gone into an expensive area of PC parts -- if the parts even exist. And a homebrew solution may not interoperate with your provider's hardware.
I'm all for do-it-yourself -- after all "if you want it done right..." -- but there are somethings that simply cannot be done without specific, customized hardware geared directly for the task.
In the case of Cisco... around the time of the Sept. 15, 2000 document, they were seeing an increasing amount of virtually new hardware entering the marketplace for pennys on the dollar from all these failed dot-com's for which Cisco was never paid. It's not a big leap to see how Cisco would want to stop that immediately. And if they can come up with this vague, unspecified cash-cow of a "recertification" process, then it's even better for Cisco.
Having seen what little is available on this laughable process, I'd rather start my own router company than deal with the bullshit. $7000 to "inspect" a 7206VXR. They will only do the inspection during business hours (8-5M-F); the router will be powered down and disassembled during the process; only Cisco is allowed to be present at the inspection. And the best part: it's a binary process... it either passes or fails. No other information is provided -- i.e. why it failed and what we need to do it get it to pass.
...there's plenty of other vendors out there who can sell you a solution for less. So why put up with the used Cisco... because of the name? Is that supposed to warrant that huge markup? They're not putting their best foot forward if that's the way they treat their (potential) customer base. They should do like Sun and offer a TRADE IN for a new model instead. Then they could cannabilze that unit for parts for existing customer.
There's not much use trying to shove Linux on a 486 when you can spend $200 and get a (faster) embedded system to do the same task. Time spent tinkering with it can be saved by going with more current (but low power) hardware, plus you'll have time to decide how you want to recycle the old box.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
One must make sure that whatever hardware they are buying has a copy of the OS with it...backed up several times preferably. It's pretty easy to back up IOS images... I'm not so sure about the NetApp.
... they have to pay for them... of course they may be hit with a re-license issue, but honestly you can still tell the company to f* off.
That way there is no issue when you buy or sell the item. If the customer wants support or updates
The other poster who was talking about first sale has a very good bit of bargaining ammunition...as for the Cisco rep who made the other guy pay after the fact I would have also told that guy to f*** off. The hardware comes with an IOS image and the customer doesn't have to buy support from Cisco... they just won't get any new IOS images or help from Cisco.
Someone reminds me when, let's say Microsoft, provided you support for software after you transfered it (illegally) to another computer. This just never happened to me or to any of my accuintances as far as I know.
Hence product activation from software vendors to enfore this part of the EULA.
The only mechanism hardware vendors can have is to track serial numbers (Cisco) or Service Tags (Dell) and enforce entitlement at the device level.
AFAIK at least in Germany those license terms are unlawful. There is a supreme court (Bundesgerichtshof) decision from the early 80's where the late Nixdorf Company was forbidden to charge for the software of second hand equipment.