The Liability of License Enforcement

The Liability of License Enforcement
By Bryan J Smith, Senior Consultant
Red Hat Global Professional Services (GPS)

Whereart thou run-time?

Everyday users and software vendors argue the merits and cons of software licensing terms, management and enforcement. Nearly every enterprise has had issues with run-time software licensing that has caused their customers downtime. The question always becomes one of cause and fault for that downtime.

Many commercial software vendors, and even the Software Business Alliance (SBA), lobby and argue that run-time software licensing enforcement is a mandatory requirement, and issues are always the cause and fault of the customer. The problem with this default attitude is when software licensing fails on the part of the commercial software vendor. Just when does the software vendor inherit the liability, when it’s partially their fault be it documentation, implementation, confusion, etc…? And what about those circumstances where the end-user is harmless and it’s caused by a bug in the software vendors run-time license enforcement?

What does a software vendor do when the customer has expended countless troubleshooting time and money on a perceived technical issue only to discover it is a “false positive” by the run-time licensing enforcement in their product?

Not our bag, but our customers are sometimes mutual …

The good news for Red Hat customers is that Red Hat long ago decided that run-time licensing, period, was not our bag. Red Hat’s entire
commercial model is based on subscription licensing for updates, not licenses for run-time. We shall never see a corporation go down due to any bugs in our licensing modules. We will always not only believe in our customers as the best people to enforce their own licenses, but we will always share our code with the community. Yes, anyone who believes they can do it better than us can take our code and even offer a competing product to our customers.

But even though we don’t believe in run-time license enforcement doesn’t mean other software vendors won’t push it upon some of our customers.
We don’t like that, not just in principle, but sometimes it takes our products down with it. Today, August 12th, we awoke to find that
several of our customers do not see our Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products running, because of a license enforcement bug in a virtualization product by another vendor. What makes the headlines in this issue is that the error codes are technical in nature, and only after extensive debugging is the root cause found — a bug in the license enforcement.

Now it’s neither our job nor our place to criticize other vendors, but we do want to do everything we can to help our, often, mutual customers.
It seems that many of our competitors, even partners in some cases, keep pushing the same issue on our customers. That issue is license enforcement, an issue that not only a liability for our customers, but a liability for our competitors and, gasp, even partners. Ironically, while many commercial software vendors are pushing run-time license enforcement, the reality is that all that is required is solid run-time license management.

Choose management, not enforcement …

We plead with our competitors, and even more so with our partners, to empower our mutual customers to help themselves. Many IT and other departments in organizations spend enough resources ensuring they are compliant with their number of run-time licenses. Any product that helps assist them with this overhead will always result in a return on investment (ROI), especially during any software audit (internal or
external). Our Red Hat Network (RHN) service and our RHN Satellite product were designed to make subscription tracking, as well as general
system management easier. We also offer our Red Hat eXchange (RHX) to our partners, and potential partners, in this collective endeavor.

Make no mistake, run-time license enforcement is a liability and a question of ethics, regardless of what laws may protect or otherwise find software vendors without fault in various locales. Automated processes that shut down software and prevent run-time execution without due process is just that, lack of due process. This is a breach of contract in many locales, with several legal cases have resulting from such. Run-time license management, should be the absolute maximum implementation, to avoid these ethical and legal liabilities as well as empower your (and possibly our) customers.

There are many ways to combine automated, run-time license management with the due process of software licenses and agreements. Although we cannot condone such behavior, and will never agree to such run-time licensing in our products and services, such agreements on enforcement can include a “report” that is provided to the software vendor from the client on their run-time usage. From this “report,” enforcement can and should only be done under due process, off-line.

On-line, run-time license management.
Off-line, run-time license enforcement.
Empower your customer.

In any and all cases, Red Hat will continue to avoid run-time licensing altogether, regardless of what our competitors and, gasp, even some of partners decide. We’ll continue to do our best to focus on the interests of the community and trying to get our competitors to see the errors of their ways.

Bryan J Smith, Senior Consultant
Red Hat Global Professional Services (GPS)