Well actually Ken, that's not quite right.  MS does indeed use some
equivalent of HPSUSAN and HPCPUNAME.  With Windows XP, the OS actually looks
at the hardware and crunches a key, which is determined by the hardware it
finds.  One of the pieces of information is the MAC address of any NIC it
finds on the system.

If you change too many pieces of hardware on the system at one time, in
varying combinations but the NIC figures prominently, you can invalidate
your OS, even though it remains on the same system.  But you can change the
CPU by itself without worry. On the HP 3000, if you change the CPU then you
can invalidate a lot of software, however if you change the NICs or the disk
drives or what have you, in any combination, the system and the various
software will not complain.

HP and the various ISVs want to make sure you have the software on a
licensed machine of the right model.  MS just wants to make sure you have
the OS on a licensed machine, irrespective of the model or CPU type.

I do agree that vendors should have a mechanism in place to handle some form
of disaster recovery.  For instance, our backup product does not require a
license to restore thus enabling DR under any circumstances.  When I was at
another software company, I designed the software so that if it detected it
had been moved or something had happened to invalidate the license, it would
spew out a message and turn itself into a 10 day demo and count down loudly
from there.  I figured 10 days would be sufficient to have the customer
contact us to get straightened out.

On yet another piece of software, I disabled any checking and rendered it
completely free when we decided to no longer support it.  After some
insistent demands by HP, we even brought it up to date recently and left it
in the public (but not open) domain, freeware.  I think that is what many on
this list are asking for.

I agree with Brian that it is ludicrous to expect ISVs, no matter what size,
to have to continue to support just a handful of customers, especially if
the ISV has moved on.  This recently occurred to us.

Last summer, we decided to get totally out of the database maintenance
picture and arranged to have all of our existing customers still on
maintenance be transferred over to another ISV in that space.  We elected to
go with the one with the largest installed base, figuring they would be the
ones who would remain extant the longest.  I will not name them, but they
have permission to identify themselves if they want to.

So, what I think is going to happen is that as ISVs elect to abandon their
space, they may either enable trade-ins or outright replacements for their
customers or they may cede their intellectual property to another vendor who
will take over support and even development from then on.  What may occur,
in the fullness of time, is that a few vendors are left supporting a much
wider array of products and thus providing continuity of support for the
remaining customers.

That is one plausible scenario.  Another would be the renewal of the HP 3000
space with the release of several emulators running on 10GHz machines with
32 GB of RAM tens of terabytes of Ultra640 SCSI or Serial ATA discs
performing like an N-4000 750MHz 1200.  You should be able to buy such a box
for under $1,000 and CompUSA in 2004. :)   The only thing missing right now
is the emulator.


Denys...