pirated SW, trial use, who's right vs. whose rights

Subject: pirated SW, trial use, who's right vs. whose rights
From: "RUBOTTOM, AL" <ARUBOTTOM -at- SENSORMATIC -dot- COM>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 10:59:31 -0700

this is NOT a simple query, IMO.

since many vendors invite trial use, often for extended periods, to let
users determine if the SW fits their needs, the notion of justifiable
try-it-first usage is a given.
Shareware, even if many consider it an unsuccessful model, embodies this
approach,,, and it relies on the honor system, altho some shareware products
include crippled functionality or timeouts, etc.
Freeware takes it to the logical extreme. if you like it, send a note, or a
donation, or whatever.
"Free" Open Source SW is another model, not by definition necessarily "free
of charge" but free to be altered/ improved/ evolved. Those who make money
in the Open Source community are relying on such a service model, as has
been elaborately explained [even if it does not penetrate some people's
thinking].

the tradition, and it is one, at least in the USA, of rugged individuality
driving a situational ethics form of "I'm the boss of me" attitude seems to
foster fuzzy values & decision/choice matrices.
the well-attested unfair practices of some monopolistic entities [hint, M$]
have also driven wider acceptance, beyond lip service, of this thinking:
"So what? I paid 'em [& way overpriced at thaht] X times already for this,
that, the other thing, I'm gonna install this one this time without paying
the full freight -- I'm entitled!" -- with which I have to agree
sometimes...

for example, I am simultaneously a home user, a consultant, a reseller, and
I work right now for a manufacturer, & the terms of service [TOS] in all
these environments are way different.

as the mfr's employee, I install various Windows OSes & other products [M$ &
other makers'] on various target PCs all day long, it's part of the license
TOS BOTH for individual test, development, runtime unit building & testing,
etc., AND for what we build & resell to users -- those end-users do have to
get a unique COA [cert. of authenticicity] which they're supposed to track,
but most lose it, and we also issue serial no's & license keys for our
proprietary SW... it won't run without 'em, allegedly.

as a home user I'm supposed to not install some things more than once or on
more than 1, or 2, or X no. of PCs, without removing a prior install, and so
on... very complicated.
I own mutiple PCs, have built, rebuilt, jettisoned so many, I literally
cannot keep track of what's on which HD, and after a HD dies, I may well
scavenge things from various sources to recoup a working system for whatever
purpose -- test, use, amusement...

In Win95 days you could easily type in one all-purpose license key that you
could easily remember...
there are also all-pupose keys for most/all later M$ OSes, if you're an MSDN
subscriber you get 'em, authorized for SW dev use & test.
how shall I count the many ways I'm supposed to draw lines about my own
usage patterns?

this kind of complexity [muddle?] DOES make for a hard-to-clarify stew, and
all of us who are seasoned or expert or even paid professionals working
within this jungle often make arbitrary sense of it, on an ad hoc basis, and
simply forge ahead -- I know, and freely admit, that I do.

YMMV,
Al

PS: all our DTP tools, PageMaker, FrameMaker, PaintShopPro, etc. are
licensed in this shop.
as for what I may have lying around here & at home [on disk, never
installed, likely to fade into 1's & 0's...], ahhhh...

-----Original Message-----

As a starting point (and a means to gracefully segue back to
tech writing), I'd love to know why more than 10% of the
people who responded to this week's poll use pirated or
unlicensed software to do their tech writing jobs.



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