Re: office machines, software copies

<how much software is enough when six users on a network share
software copied from a server?>

Unless the material's distribution is controlled by an electronic lender and unless the vendor's license distribution allows for electronic lending, then you will need 6 or 7 copies depending on whether the vendor attempts to license per machine or per user. In fact, this assumes that 6 is the total number of users who have access to the server. In general, you must license proportional to the size of the network.

However, from the point of view of users, vendors, and network administrators (and I have heard quasi-officially from each), the electronic check-out of software (which makes the software uncopyable and which licenses for individual concurrent uses) is the preferred mechanism. In this case you would buy k<6 copies of Filemaker for your 6 users, check to see how often more than k copies are requested (and thus denied), and buy more as required. The vendors are happier since their software is never made accessible to end users in an unencrypted (copyable) form.

David Dailey
<David.P.Dailey[_at_]williams.edu>
Received on Mon Feb 07 1994 - 22:28:31 GMT