To: Ilaine who wrote (6777 ) 8/6/2001 2:01:23 PM From: Arrow Hd. Respond to Cobalt, you have hit on one of the most problematic issues and there are no easy answers when the secondary market comes into play. Many vendors tried to address hardware transfers. IBM had a clause in their Customer Agreement at one time requiring an owner or "rightful possessor" to copy the LIC terms from the CA and provide them to the new "rightful possessor" at the time of transfer. This was not practical and it was a false protection. Later, the LIC Ts and Cs were pasted inside the processor control panel invoking the Ts and Cs. Not particularly effective. Finally, the microcode was modified such that upon starting up the machine (IML, IPL, etc.)the display unit supporting the process control function issued an initial screen displaying that the machine contained LIC, if you execute the machine's instruction set (run the machine) you are accepting the LIC Ts and Cs which were then displayed. The machine operator had to take a specific action to accept these terms before the machine would run which could be as simple as simply continuing to bring the system up. This put secondary users on notice and had them take an action which locked in the LIC Ts and Cs. For software above the external user interface it depends upon the license terms. PC and intermediate systems generally allow the software to move with the machine but for much of the mainframe stuff the license is to a specific enterprise customer number and is not transferable outside the enterprise. In this case, microcode encryption routines match serial numbers and if there is a mismatch the machine may either stop or there is a notice on the console warning of a copyright violation. Sometimes a time-out feature brings the machine down after a period of time.
