{"id":2348,"date":"2010-03-24T17:08:32","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T16:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2348"},"modified":"2010-03-25T15:26:53","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T14:26:53","slug":"can-you-guarantee-that-youll-always-have-access-to-your-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2348","title":{"rendered":"Can you guarantee that you&#8217;ll always have access to your software?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I work for a large university in the UK and part of my job involves helping to look after our site licenses for software such as MATLAB, Origin, Labview, Mathematica,Abaqus and the NAG Library among many others.\u00a0 Now, anyone who works in this field will know that no two site licenses are alike.\u00a0 For example, one license might allow any member of the university to install it on any machine that they own whereas others are limited only to <strong>university owned <\/strong>machines.\u00a0 There are lots of little rules like this and I could go on for quite a while about some of the gotchas but I&#8217;d prefer to focus this post on something close to my heart right now &#8211; the matter of <strong>perpetual usage<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine, if you will, that you are the coordinator for a degree course and you are completely overhauling the\u00a0 syllabus.\u00a0 Part of this overhaul will concern the software that you use and teach as part of this course.\u00a0 You want to standardize on just one package so that students won&#8217;t have to learn a new system every semester.\u00a0 After reviewing all of the possibilities, you finally decide that it is going to be either <strong>software A <\/strong>or <strong>software B<\/strong>.\u00a0 Both are powerful, easy to use, considered an industry standard etc etc.\u00a0 As far as functionality goes there really isn&#8217;t much between them.\u00a0 Which one to choose?<\/p>\n<p>You invite your friendly,neighborhood software geek out for coffee and ask him to talk about the two software packages.\u00a0 He <strong>likes<\/strong> talking about this sort of stuff and usually has a lot to say.\u00a0 He talks about open-source alternatives, programming styles, speed, potentially useful books, other people in your field who use this type of software and so on.\u00a0 Eventually he starts talking about licensing and offers the following tidbit of information.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Our license for <strong>Software A<\/strong> includes <strong>perpetual use<\/strong>.\u00a0 This means that if our funding dried up we could stop paying our maintenance agreement but we would never lose access to the software.\u00a0 Of course we&#8217;d not be able to upgrade to the latest version any more but we&#8217;d always have access to the version we have right now.<\/li>\n<li>Our license for <strong>Software B<\/strong> doesn&#8217;t include perpetual use.\u00a0 So, if we stopped paying our maintenance agreement then we can&#8217;t use the software anymore.\u00a0 We&#8217;d have to stop using it for teaching, research&#8230;.everything.\u00a0 You&#8217;d have to go and buy your own license for it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;How likely is it that we might stop funding either of them?&#8221; you ask.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Oh, pretty unlikely,&#8221; comes the reply as he rests his coffee mug over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/education\/2009\/apr\/28\/peter-scott-higher-education-budget\">that day&#8217;s newspaper headline<\/a> &#8220;We are a big university and both of these packages are key to what we do.\u00a0 I&#8217;d say we are very unlikely to stop funding either of them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I have a question to you all.\u00a0 Would the lack of perpetual use for <strong>Software B <\/strong>be a factor in your decision concerning what you would use for your teaching and research?<strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I work for a large university in the UK and part of my job involves helping to look after our site licenses for software such as MATLAB, Origin, Labview, Mathematica,Abaqus and the NAG Library among many others.\u00a0 Now, anyone who works in this field will know that no two site licenses are alike.\u00a0 For example, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-BS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2348"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2412,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348\/revisions\/2412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}