Make Sure Your Software Vendors Can't Lock Up Your Most Important Assets
from the an-important-lesson dept
Two totally separate stories today highlight the importance of recognizing the difference between "owning" a piece of software and just "licensing" it (an issue that's getting some attention in the courts these days). First comes the story of the parking garage in New Jersey that operates with a giant parking robot that moves the cars around, making more efficient use of the space. There was a contract dispute with the company who runs the parking robot, and its employees were kicked off the premises, taking the intellectual property rights of the software that runs the robot with them -- leaving the giant parking robot and the cars it had parked stuck in park. Then, there's the story of a bunch of doctors offices who used some proprietary patient medical records software called Dr. Notes. The company behind Dr. Notes decided to raise their license fees by a huge amount -- and doctors who refused to give in suddenly discovered they could no longer access their patients' records, presenting a fairly serious problem for those whose well-being depend on their doctor knowing their medical history. In both cases, the companies providing the licenses recognized (correctly) that this allowed them a tremendous amount of leverage in any future contract negotiation, since they could (literally, in some cases) lock up their customers' most important assets. For companies buying technology products who think things like the details of intellectual property law and licenses don't matter, perhaps these stories will make them a little more aware of a few of the reasons why it's important to understand what you license and what you own -- and recognizing that you never want to trust your most important assets to an outside vendor.
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I need to go buy myself a tie.
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Re:
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Software licensing these days is just crap.
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Re: binding contracts
Then once you are about to renew it (while you are still in contract) you negotiate with them. and be prepared to re-key.
leaving it until the product expires is just stupid.. you've lost all your negotiation leverage.
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Unfortunately from what I understand, this is the exception more than the rule when it comes to high-end software.
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read contract and click "I agree" or find somethin
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read contract and click "I agree" or find somethin
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Or for every car owner involved to charge both other parties with theft.
Or for a surgical strike team of industrial robotics experts, hackers, and ninjas.
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Don't Agree
You can do whatever you want with it ..
....Drive it like you stole it ..
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upgrades can be like that...
file format incompatible with earlier versions
are in the same vein.
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Get a clue
Maybe next time they'll think about how their data is stored. Or find someone to get their data out to another system - It's not brain surgery.
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Re: Get a clue
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Overflow into ASP's
Whether it's at a organization like Google storing your email, or a SalesForce.com storing all of your sales data. At a business level there should be a proportional amount of upfront due diligence as compared to the direct impact the information being stored could have on your business.
Some firms go to great lengths to provide assurances, while others go to great lengths to insure they have flexibility in the future.
But when you are talking about small businesses, whether a doctors office or a parking garage it is rare that they have the resources inhouse that actually understand these issues, therefore the attention paid to this during initial purchase is minimal. All they care about at the point of purchase is features and capabilities. Hard to blame them. Only way I see to improve this is to have it highly publicized.
-Matt
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