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The Omega licensing issue will probably be argued to the end of the
earth. Granted, Omega's TS license seems unfair and unnecessarily
restrictive-- but licensing at the other end of the spectrum can work very
much to the advantage of someone who uses it cleverly.
Back in 1980 when IBM came to Bill Gates to buy Application software for
their (then secret) IBM PC, Gates agreed to produce the Apps and IBM
mentioned --as an after thought-- "Of course we'll need a DOS operating
system -- you have one, don't you?" Gates didn't, but knew someone who
had been working on one.
He hooked IBM up with Gary Kildall of Digital Research, but Gary couldn't
live with IBM's restrictive licensing and legal requirements, so IBM gave
up and went back to Gates for an OS. He still didn't have one but had
heard bout a another guy in a Seattle computer store who also had been
working on one. Gates called him and bought it for something like $75K and
brought in-house to complete it for the IBM project.
When final negotiations for the Apps with IBM took place, Gates told them
he would give them DOS, but wanted to keep the rights to license it to
others-- just in case he found some need to do so. IBM agreed, since it
seemed like some useless piece of intermediary software that nobody would
care about anyway.
Even though the original IBM PCs were pretty lame, they established the
basic technical architecture by which future "clones" would be built for
the next 20+ years. As IBM lost PC market-share and many clone
manufacturers came into prominence, they all had to go to Gates to buy DOS
for each of the PCs that they built.
DOS, and the licensing agreement that Gates had cleverly thought to ask IBM
for, became the foundation for the growth of MicroSoft in the '80s & '90s --
Yes, the Omega, DOS, Windows, and Gates haters are steaming at their
keyboards right now, but sometimes an alternative perspective can be at
least entertaining-- if not a little bit instructive... :)
____________________________
At 07:21 PM 02/10/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >The bigger question, and I've never heard an explanation, why is
> >software any different from books or music or any other
> >intellectual property? Just "because" a contract or license agreement
> >exists, that does not make it legal. Particularly when it's at odds with
> >advertising for the product. Here's a few links and excerpts:
>
>I was involved in this issue a long time ago and recall that if you
>sell somebody something, they own it and are free to do anything they
>want with it (including reverse engineer it). This is not a major
>problem with a physical product but is with a software product.
>
>The license approach is a license to use. If I license you to use my
>search engine on your web site for X months or years, it is still my
>property and your rights are circumscribed by the license document.
>
>Early software was often bundled with computer systems that were
>leased with hardware such as the early IBM computers. The supplier
>certainly wanted to prevent the user from being able to continue to
>use the software if they no longer leased the hardware, hence a
>license to use.
>
>But an irrevocable, fully paid up license for a software product has
>always been transferrable, perhaps with some permission from the
>owner to assure proper training, etc., with a "said permission shall
>not be unreasonably withheld" provision.
>
>Back to the original topic, I don't think anybody is complaining
>about licensing TradeStation. They are complaining that permission to
>transfer the license is being unreasonably withheld...
>
>Bob Fulks
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