Technically Speaking

With new technology rolling out all the time and changes to hardware becoming faster and more frequent it seems as though companies can quickly fall behind in the race to be leading edge.

Using programs like Microsoft Software Assurance and Open Value can help your organization stay up front with both applications and their licensing which is so important for IT administrators to consider.

I am not a licensing expert – yet.  Hopefully in the near future I will get started down that path, simply to help my organization and others better understand the lengthy and very snooze worthy EULA.

Licensing seems to be the glue that either holds the IT organization together or the frustration that causes early baldness in IT pros all over.  I am not sure why the documents are so hard to comprehend (and yes I know that they really aren’t that bad, but you have to read them).

It seems to me that Microsoft (and other organizations) want to get all the possible scenarios into the license so they do not miss anything or leave any loopholes, which is understandable, but the efforts to do so seem to pull all of the trustworthy out of computing.  If you cannot trust your users and have to put huge license agreements out for all products except Bob (surely all of you have seen MS Bob), most aren’t going to read the EULA anyway.  This does two things:

1. gets the user to agree blindly to the terms laid out in the EULA

2. gets the vendor nowhere in terms of its customers understanding the agreements they put out.

One thing I would like to know is where can one go to find materials to learn about how licensing works not to mention get the EULA for a product before purchasing it?  Sure there are sites and books and blogs about licensing, but what training material is out there for the beast?

I do not have a huge issue with licensing other than trying to learn it.  Really it is there to protect the manufacturer and the user and should be followed, but when I saw the Windows Server 2008 Licensing for Dummies hand out at Tech Ed, it made me wonder why would they need to even joke about a Dummies manual for licensing?

Hopefully licensing gets more user friendly in the future, after all the word user is even in the title of the document.  They aren’t called the IT Professional License Agreement.

Have any of you found a good tactic for learning more about licensing or a way to gain from reading product EULAs?  If so, post in the comments or contact me, I would be interested in finding out how others handle it.

Update: Poll added below

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