From: gsady@gaffa-1.mcd.intel.com (Gene Sady ~)
Newsgroups: comp.text.frame
Subject: Re: Licensing FM
Date: 23 Nov 92 19:02:12 GMT
	<1992Nov17.200620.11329@asl.dl.nec.com>
	<1992Nov18.033803.17768@cbnewsk.cb.att.com>
	<cf4AMn600WBO00s4gm@andrew.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: gsady@mcd.intel.com
Organization: INTeL Memory Components Division

>
>  >Software licenses:  another point in favor of flexible work hours.
>  >During the day people are banging heads getting licenses, but in the
>  >evening, 10 licenses sit idle (except for those 999 folks who didn't
>  >exit when they went home).
>
>  This is more of an argument for lowering licensing prices to some
>  reasonable level. I cannot imagine anyone at the user level actualling
>  liking floating licenses (as opposed to more reasonable single user
>  licenses or site licenses). From an economic point of view it makes
>  no sense at all and from a system administration point of view it is
>  just one more thing for the sys adm and the help desk to be concerned
>  about.

This is a very narrow-minded view in my opinion. Whether or not floating
licenses are economic has everything to do with the environment in which
they are being used. In our engineering environment in which
documentation needs are cyclical depending on the phase of the
engineering project, floating licenses make perfect sense. It is rare
that more than one project will be in it's documentation phase at the
same time. The tricky part is trying to guess at the proper ratio of
licenses to users. For our environment 5 users for 1 license works o.k.

Also floating licenses are much easier to administer. License
configuration only needs to be done on one machine. Records of license
access is centrally saved in one log file.

>
>  And in a collaborative environment why would you want "a point in favor
>  of flexible work hours?" I'm all for technology as a business re-engineering
>  tool when the benefits to improving the quality or efficiency of a process
>  are clear, but when you buy software which forces changes to user behaviors
>  to match the vendor's requirements where is the win?

Again with some intelligent guesses to numbers of floating licenses the
use of the licenses should be relatively transparent. You will notice
that most UNIX vendors are providing options of floating licenses. This
is not because THEY want to do it but because their customers want it.

>  In our operation we compared the functionality of tools such as FrameMaker
>  and Interleaf with WordPerfect and Word and the former were the clear winners.
>  But in business, today, a document preparation package is not an application
>  it is a part of the corporate infrastructure and, as such, it must be
>  ubiquitous to be useful. Each time that someone sits down at system to
>  put an idea onto paper and finds that they cannot save it because there isn't
>  a license available I will have lost a good idea. Perhaps, among the ones I
>  lost, was an idea about a new safety feature for automobiles that could save
>  10,000 lives, annually. I don't want to take that chance.

Hopefully these bright people can figure out that there is more than one
way to get an idea down "on paper". In these days of powerful desktop
workstations and semi-paperless office I think we are forgetting the
usefullness of a pencil and paper. If a user is stuck there is always
other on-line methods of creating documentation that can be used for
quick inporting into Frame, Interleaf, etc. such as vi, emacs...

Gene Sady - gsady@mcd.intel.com

MCD Design Systems Support, Intel Folsom, m/s FM3-100, 356-6851
--

Gene Sady

gsady@mcd.intel.com - Intel Corporation - Folsom, CA

     "I wish I could write you a melody so plain
      It could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
      It could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
      Of your useless and pointless knowledge." -   Bob Dylan
Newsgroups: comp.text.frame