License Management Facility (LMF)

[Michael Meissner]

In article <00934FEF.79711AA0 at KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
sysmgr at KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes:

| In article <54695 at bbn.COM>, fkittred at bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge) writes:
| >>Any other UNIX operating system (Sun OS, Berkie, AT&T, AIX) doesn't do this
| >>LMF stuff. Do they? Nope. Only Digital. 
| >
| I was referring to Digital.
| 
| If you purchase a Sun box, you get SunOS with an unlimited number of users.
| If you purchase a DEC box, you get ULTRIX with a two user license. If you
| want more than two users/windows at a time, you have to pay to upgrade
| to 4, 8, and so forth.
| 
| In the VMS world, I've yet to install a software product on our cluster
| which users LMF  other than Digital's products.

I believe the 'two user' problem is an artifact of the System V.2
license structure, which has such silliness in it.  For those of you
who never dealt with AT&T System V.2 licenses, there was a tiered
scheme where a vendor selling a 1 user system had to send xx dollars
to AT&T, and as the number of users increased, so did the dollars
flowing back to AT&T.  At one point when I worked for Data General, we
had something like 32 different model numbers for UNIX (16 levels +
USA/international).  Since Ultrix is based on System V.2 [somewhat],
and not on System V.3 which did away with different user systems
except for 1/many users, I would imagine, DEC didn't want to raise
prices in order to send the appropriate bucks to AT&T.

--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA

Catproof is an oxymoron, Childproof is nearly so