Dibbler's Net

From http://www.deploylinux.net/matt/2008/08/all-your-vms-belong-to-us.html

Quoting “As of tomorrow morning, VM’s running on all hosts with ESX 3.5U2 in enterprise configurations will not power on.”

The current thought is that some beta/preview code got left into the application that basically is a nothing works past this data kind of thing. The workaround fix of setting your system clock back a few days only breaks a few Federal rules if you are in a corporate environment.

Not wanting to just repost someone elses blog entry and the fact the news is quickly jumping on this story I wanted to post my personal issues with this problem.

Way back when I was writing software widgets for Web servers licensing was a big issue. As a coder I wanted to protect my code. Make it so that anyone using it really did pay for it. We also needed a way for people to try it. This meant using a registration key with an expiration date. This was really the only choice to allow people to demo something and to help offset some of the easier widget stealing.  The problem was is that the real version also included this code so if you bought a full version we gave you a license key that was good till 2032. Now this was many many years ago and since then I have drastically changed my thoughts on this area. First I am generally opposed to any software that requires any call home function to stay alive and is any way dependent on licensing every year. I understand that there is more SAS type of licensing and certain subscription type services like Antivirus where yearly costs are part of the model, for the moment I am leaving those out of this thought.

When it comes to actual software, where I have paid full price for the software up front then that software should not have any type of date based restriction anywhere in the code. If I choose to not pay for maintenance a year from now then I should not receive product updates ( security patches yes, new functionality no) but the base product should still continue to work. There are too many documented cases where software expires and then customers are basically strongarmed into paying higher fees just to keep their doors open. Or in some cases the vendor gets sold or goes away and now you have an expensive door stop. When you are looking to buy that next big software application for your business make sure that you evaluate licensing in your product criteria and test for date based kills. Any software that requires this type of licensing should be last on your product selection list. Going back to when I wrote software we actually found this to be enough of an issue that we changed how we distributed demo software. We moved to a model where we compiled a special demo build that worked for 30 days. But this was a different set of code then what we sold which had no Date restriction code in it at all. In the end it was the only fair way to treat paying customers. Now if other vendors could start to understand that it’s wrong to extort your customers and this VMWare issue is a direct result of that attitude. The only way we can fix this is to start demanding that vendors treat us better.

D~