Software running on demo licence? At least one patty pusher is Lovin' It Software licensing is the bane of IT pros. Some spend hours poring over byzantine rules and regulations while others throw in the towel and roll things themselves. Then there are those that simply ignore the pleas for a production licence. A case in point is McDonald's, which (at least as far as this outlet is concerned) seems …
Missing or expired licences are not uncommonly caused by failures in the network, or failures in the licence server.
Last year I was one of an entire office of developers who were temporarily deprived of IntelliJ. It turned out that the licence server, being an undemanding and generally unregarded piece of software, had been hosted on a machine whose primary purpose was something totally unconnected. When the unconnected purpose was migrated to a new machine, the licence server was decommissioned along with the old machine.
Good Lord! If I had a dollar for every time I took a support call where someone forgot to input the license key.....
Here is what happens, usually at renewal time... Purchasing agent renews the license. Software vendor sends license activation to purchasing agent because they signed the document. Purchasing agent, being a good bean counter, tucks the documentation safely away just in case they are ever audited.....never handing it off to the tech staff.
About 4:50pm on Friday, the big shot at the customer calls the sales droid. The sales droid calls their team in a panic. Some poor tech works late on Friday to backdoor the software in to demo mode on the customer's promise they will solve the problem on Monday. Pub, party, weekend, and no one remembers come Monday. Thirty or so days later...expired demo message.
Every damn time. Gimme my dollar!
I worked for a large British based PC seller in the late 90s early 2000s who used to use an unlicensed version of the DOS compression utility ARJ on their recovery CDs. The discs were shipped with every PC they sold, so we are talking probably a few million copies over the years. It clearly said in the license for ARJ they were shipping that it was not for commercial use, but no one seem to care. So after I left the company I reported it to FAST but i don't know if anything was every done about it.
Dealt many times with situations such as this.. Even this summer, when people started to go back to their office PCs after months of working on our VDI infrastructure, we found a lot of the machines had lost their Licences for MS Office. Thankfully, using System Centre, one of our admins was able to push a fix to a lot of the machines.1
Also, on a side note, at work, we have used Adobe Audition since it was Cool Edit (i.e. before it was Adobe Audition). Thanks to an interesting error by our purchasing office, I had 400 licences for Cool Edit registered to me. Would have been interesting if I'd have left the company.
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