From: PCOEN@DREW.DREW.EDU (Paul Coen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Will lmf kill alpha?
Date: 20 Aug 92 07:44:00 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The Internet

>Will lmf kill alpha?
> 
>A while ago somebody asked if it is necessary to install lmf 1.1.
> 
>Somebody else answered dec had good products an bad products - unfortunately
>lmf belonged to the latter.
> 
>My understanding is that VMS and ultrix is not widely used in universities and
>other research institutions compared to other unix derivations because of the
>administrative overhead caused by correctly using lmf.

What?  That's odd.  We've had our share of annoyances with products
expiring here and there, but I'd hardly say that the product is "hard to use."
At the moment, I've been a stopgap system manager here at Drew, and it took
me about five minutes to figure out how the license utility works under
VMS.  When the issue came up under ultrix, it was mearly a case of finding
out that the command was lmf.  (Well, and entering the PAK information using
vi wasn't exactly a treat.)

I can't speak for research institutions, but our experience here with 
the license utility under VMS (it seems to be used more extensivly on the
VMS side than the Ultrix side still) has been fine.  We are part of the
CSLG (Campus Software License Grant) program, which means that once
a year, we copy a com file that builds a new license database for most
of Digital's VMS software.  We still have to enter PAK's for products that
aren't covered, or older products that Digital has discontinued (the
old Lisp, for example), but that we have indiviual PAK's for.

You can go into the lmf utility and print out a list of when things
expire (if they expire).  It's not really difficult.  I'd rather have
a central utility with a license database, rather than every package
having its own, built-in key, a key that will make it blow up on x, y,
or z date.  Updating a license with the VMS Patch command always struck
me as kind of cheezy, on packages where that was needed.

Anyway, any organization that bases the decision on the "difficulty" of using
a license utility is really looking at things in an odd way.  Price/performance,
the availablility of software, and vendor support are three things that I'd
rate higher than that -- and Digital does pretty well in all three areas.  
Alpha should boost the first two, and I expect that the third will continue.
I can't really see an organization not going with Alpha because of lmf --
especially since Alpha could be running operating systems that don't
HAVE lmf.  Remember -- Digital is selling the chips to other manufacturers.

Not getting VMS or Ultrix because of lmf would probably be similar to not
buying a car because that particular model has an ignition keyhole that
is a little clumsy to put the key into in the dark.  And it's not
very clumsy at that.

I'm sure that there are lmf horror stories, but I've had pretty good luck with
it.  I could see that an organization that doesn't like the software 
licensing policies could opt to go with another vendor, but that has nothing
to do with lmf itself -- that's pricing and marketing.  And as I mentioned
above, Universities can get a rather attractive licensing package.

Newsgroups: comp.os.vms