Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers)

[forrestc () IMACH COM (Forrest W. Christian)]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Eric Sherrill wrote:

> I disagree with the assessment that it only helps honest people stay honest,
> in large part because tying license managers to supposedly "unique"
> information like MAC addresses, can become a real pain for the sysadmin.
> Here are some examples.

A license manager does not need to disallow access to a piece of software.
I'm sorry that what I was talking about wasn't clearer, (and was probably
off the original topic) but what I was envisioning was more of a license
"counting and accounting" scheme instead of a "prevent someone from
stealing our software" scheme, the latter being something which I think
causes more frustration than it's worth.

In the last bit of the Apple II days, a LOT of people ended up making
purchasing decisions on whether the disk could be easily copied/backed up
instead of between "micro-features".

However, if you are trying to track how many licenses are in use, a
consistent method of saying "these x mac addresses have Office 2000
installed and in use" in order to verify that you have the appropriate
number of licenses.  If implemented correctly, this is something that both
Microsoft and a Company could agree on as a measure of how many licenses
were in use - to protect both the company and the software vendor from
problems knowing how many licenses really are needed.

- Forrest W. Christian (forrestc () imach com) KD7EHZ
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