23 Jun
2000
23 Jun
'00
2:25 p.m.
Bill Yakowenko <yakowenk(a)cs.unc.edu> wrote:
My point it, software *could* be licensed the way the
contents of
books are; it need not imply any ill-conceived notions that hinder
transferrability, such as binding to a CPU. The holder of the original
media could be the legal holder of the license, just as with books.
The book analogy could work just fine, and the market has *not*
rejected it.
And in fact Borland used to do exactly that. Their license explicitly
stated that the software was like a book, and that they were happy as long
the software was only run on one machine at any given time (just like a
book generally can only be read by one person at a time). Wish I had a
copy of the license to type in; as commercial software licenses go it was
one of the best.
They didn't explicitly state it, but I suppose that just as you might
tear a book in two so that two people can read different parts of it
simultaneously, perhaps you could simultaneously run two portion of the
Borland software on two computers.
Eric