nowadays laptops are cheap and cheap to ship, while expensive software is not getting any less expensive. E.g. see the Flash development environment from Adobe, or the non-express Visual Studio, or Xilinx, and so on. Lots of really expensive packages out there for various professional constituencies.
Perhaps this calls for the sale/resale or rent/lease of laptops with these packages installed? Presumably this would not make sense for people who are very concerned about security aspect of putting their code on such a “used” laptop, but then perhaps many people wouldn’t mind, or else such concerns would be addressed via some combination of trusted system restore from disk image, firewalls and other security measures that might be sold by companies in the ecosystem around the marketplace.
Has anybody encountered implementations of this business idea? Are there good reasons why this wouldn’t work in real life?
so Adobe offers rental, while others don’t. Whereas if entire laptop is rented or resold on an efficient and high liquidity market, the problem would go away, regardless of the wishes of the software publisher.
Why would I buy a laptop with the software installed when I could just, you know, buy the software? All that pre-installing the software would do is raise the price of a laptop while restricting it’s purchase to people who specifically want that software.
Very high end software is licensed with a cryptographic license that can include things like precise features set, may be locked to a particular machine, and may have a time period. The other approach is a dongle, i.e. an external device - now also cryptographically managed - although in times gone past rather less secure - that is required for the software to run. FlexLM and RLM are tow examples of such license systems.
Managing a license key is vastly less effort than managing a physical machine.
Years ago I managed a local academic supercomputer facility. One of my constant efforts was to try to talk vendors of expensive software - and we are talking systems that could cost hundreds of thousands when fully featured - into doing some form of software rental. They were all pretty uninterested. They had a model of only being interested in the big account customers. Even now they are not all that good about it.
But the mechanism is easy. You simply get a license key for the software you want that times out. A web interface that takes a credit card and mails you the key works fine. No different to many other software purchases from a technical point of view.
How secure is this? Well once you have the software you can almost certainly work out how to overcome the license system. But once you have a physical laptop with the software this is also possible. Even if the software were on an encrypted file system, it must be decrypted when running in memory, and all these measures are mere speed humps. I would be inclined to say that, as with most other software, the vendors are happy to get money from the honest, and are resigned to the fact that there will always be some users that are not willing to pay, but are willing to pirate the software.
Another useful aspect to these license systems is that you don’t need to lock the software to one machine. A “floating” license may be installed on a central serve, and it can be checked out onto the machine of whoever needs the software at that moment. Works quite well and is quite popular. Many companies charge a premium for floating versus node locked licences. The user also need not be in the same physical location as the license server, so long as they have an IP connection to it. The licensed software checks with the server periodically to ensure it is still correctly authorised to run.
Apart from this, which is a very good point, most really expensive software is based on licences. It would cost computer companies a lot of money to get a licence for every computer they sell when they don’t know that all their customers actually want that software. They will only pre-install software if they know that the vast majority of their customers will use that software and that they prefer not to self-install.
This is why I have seen a lot of consumer computers sold with MS Office (full version) installed as standard, but only at places like PC World where they’re catering to people who don’t actually know much about computers; PCWorld do have to pay for the licence, but they can pretty much guarantee that everyone they sell to will want to use MSOffice and they’re marketing to a clientele that is a little technophobic and doesn’t want to self-install software.
(Obviously not all PC World customers are technophobes or newbies, but that’s their core demographic).
Francis Vaughan’s explanations sound interesting, but I don’t understand how they invalidate my proposal. Maybe they even support it, though not sure.
First of all, some expensive packages (maybe “expensive” by my standards and not by corporate ones) don’t come with cryptographic licenses. Second, why don’t we rent or resell these cryptographic licenses together with the laptop?
I agree that rental licenses are a competing business strategy to this. But rental licenses are a strategy for software publishers. What I am proposing is a strategy for everybody else out there, who doesn’t feel waiting until software publishers introduce those licenses.
Further, just because we have (for the sake of argument) created a resale marketplace here, it doesn’t mean that people will actually resell every laptop. If you rent a license or laptop, the money is gone. If you buy the laptop with an option to resell, maybe you will keep it long term or maybe you will cash in on the resale value. So you get flexibility.
RE SciFiSam, if the demand for laptops preinstalled with Flash CS5 oustrips supply of both new and for-resale ones, let the technician go grab a laptop and do the installation at the time when the order arrives :smack:
so you think that :smack: means “face palm”? I thought it was similar to :eek: meaning “oh boy”. Kind of like I hit myself on the forehead out of irritation or despair. Anyway, so sorry about that, I will not use this smiley in the future.
it is? Can somebody confirm or refute this claim that it is illegal for a laptop with some expensive software to be sold or rented for use to another individual?
It would all depend on the EULA for the specific software. It would probably be considered redistribution, which usually is not allowed without specific permission from the software author/owner. But I don’t know, you’d have to actually read that big block of mumbo jumbo when you install it.
You may think you’re licensing the software for a specific machine, but in fact are licensing it for an individual, and may not be legally transferred.
For example, Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 EULA says:
This. I’d much rather buy whatever software I want, rather than having it pre-installed when I might not want it and definitely don’t want to pay for software I don’t need. For a while there, AOL came installed on every single damn computer, and once I was through with using AOL, I did my best to remove every trace of it from my computers.
I might pay more for software because I’m buying it retail, but if I buy only ONE unit of software for myself, as opposed to having half a dozen programs come pre-installed, then I’m probably saving money.
Quite frequently, too, there are cheap or even free substitutes for some of the more expensive software…and this cheap/free stuff is sometimes better than the expensive version.
I just noticed this thread. Sorry for the late response.
The premise is invalid. There is a market for laptops with expensive software installed. I used to be in the software business myself, and there were definitely people who would rather get their $5,000 software package preinstalled on a computer that’s known to work well with it. It’s called “buying a turnkey system.”
It was especially common with software that required some type of specialty hardware to be installed in the computer, thus making software installation and configuration that much more difficult. I liked the scenario because it meant my tech support people were intimately familiar with the hardware when someone called the support line for help.