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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cisco/Juniper right of resale.
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, William B. Norton wrote:
> Caveat: When I walked the Cisco and Juniper contacts through the
> research paper ("Do ATM-based Internet Exchanges Make Sense Anymore?")
> they pointed to the software license as being non-transferable, and
> therefore requiring a new license from the vendor to be legitimate.
I believe this is still an open legal argument waiting to be tested. They
claim it, but no one has fought it yet. In federal law there is a concept
called right of resale. Note article dates when reading:
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/14_11/federal/758-1.html
http://articles.corporate.findlaw.com/articles/file/00353/009275
The grey area starts when they point out IOS is software and software has
had a limited success with licenses that claim ownership of your soul and
other crazy ideas in some legal arenas. There's ample analogies where this
would be arguable: You can't sell your car with the diagnostics software
that's built in under the hood and removing it makes the car not turn on?
The one that would take some fund-age to argue is: non-transferable where
non-transferable makes the hardware a huge rock and impedes on my right
of resale. You devalued what I purchased by claiming I can't give it
as-is to someone else for money.
Claims of "write your own IOS to run on the hardware" or pointing to
fledgling open-source attempts to circumvent this problem are ludicrous at
best.
Currently, I practice and encourage: "(re)license it unless you want to be
the company that takes Cisco to court to question their right to say
non-transferable." With all of the sympathetic facial expressions I can
give that it's a silly idea.
There was a good news article about Cisco and Netapp both doing this a
while back though. I can't find it now and I don't know if Netapp still
does it.
Gerald (Not a lawyer, and not going to court on your behalf.)
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