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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nemer who wrote (6966)	4/9/1999 10:08:00 AM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

Well, typically those licenses read "on a single hard drive on a single machine." Let's say you install such an app on drive D. Unless it's a very old 16-bit app, It's dollars to doughnut holes that the app will install approximately a googol of DLLs into your windows system (or system32) directory, and write upwards of forty ton of crap in the system registry, both on your C drive. How are you going to move all of that stuff with the removable hard drive? Usually, the answer is you have to install it separately on each target machine. Does that violate the license agreement? More important to my mind, if this is not a commercial application, does it violate a fair use of the application according to the license? I'm not trying to tell you how to resolve that question. Most license agreements either flatly deny the capability in inconsistent ways or leave it unresolved. As an example of inconsistent, I would call a license to "install on a single hard drive" inconsistent if the installation writes stuff on more than one drive, as most do. That leaves you to interpret it, IMO. Personally I think a fair use determination is the most important. With certain exceptions (e.g., OS software, low level utilities, network gateways, etc) I generally decide fair use is one user at a time unless the license explicitly allows more. There are some license agreements that are clear and practical. Borland used to grant an explicit one user at a time license to its C compilers, for example. Microsoft office allows a business computer and a personal computer provided you control 85% of the usage on the business computer (or used to - I haven't read it lately). Others are clear and impractical, so you either have to live with it or not, but at least you know what you're doing (Partition Magic is an example - I don't like it but I live with it). Sorry, digressing, but the point is there's a lot more to it than just moving one hard drive, usually. You'll probably have to install the apps on each machine anyhow. If THAT goes down ok, then if it's physically possible I'd network the suckers and run the app from a single hard drive over the network provided that satisfied my determination of fair use within the license agreement. If that doesn't go down, you'd have to uninstall it and reinstall it every time you moved the hard drive, so why move the hard drive? Spots