[plug] USA software legislation

[John Summerfield]

> 
>                                 
>                                AS THE SOFTWARE industry cracks down on its
>                                customers, the software itself is opening up.
> Open
>                                Source software, the freely available alternat
> ive
> to
>                                commercial software, is making inroads in the
>                                corporate world because of its superior
> flexibility,
>                                adaptability, and cost. Despite this competiti
> on,
> the
>                                commercial software industry has decided that
>                                now's the time to make licensed software less
>                                flexible, less adaptable, and above all, more
>                                expensive. A proposed new law, called the Unif
> orm


Your formatting could have been a little better;-(


Join the real world. 

Lots of software is licensed on similar terms now. It's much easier to pay 
for Big bikkies software month-by-month or year-by-year than to pay for it 
up front. it also makes better economic sense for users of big ticket 
software.

II'm referring to software such as is used by banks & larger government 
departments; they use enormous mainframes with software bills to match. As 
they spread hardware costs over time by leasing, so do they pay regular 
software licenses. Typically these licenses included regular product 
updates and support for problem resolution.

I don't think OSS software's going to have much impact here; I don't see 
anyone finding the resources to put together free software comparable to 
OS/390, VTAM, CICS, DB2, IMS/DB, IMS/DC, JES2, JES3 etc.

Bear in mind that the DB2 you might see running under Linux isn't quite 
the same as IBM's mainframe customers use.




-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.