Inside IT

Drivers without licence

Just because you pay for software doesn't mean you own it, says Mary Branscombe

With almost anything else you buy, once you've paid for it, you own it, and you can do what you want with it. With software, you are only buying a licence to use it within limits, and you need to know what those limitations are. It makes no difference if software is free - there are still restrictions. Because software is free to download doesn't mean it is free for everyone to use, as US senator Orrin Hatch found out recently.

Shortly after Hatch suggested allowing copyright holders to hack into the computers of people using pirate copies of their work, irate bloggers discovered his website was using unlicensed software for its navigation. The software, from a company called Milonic, is free for non-commercial use - provided you apply for a free licence and include a link to Milonic's site. The site developers had done neither and Milonic has now decided government users and political groups don't count as not-for-profit groups under the terms of its licence.

The licence terms were clear on Milonic's site. But many people either don't read licence agreements or don't understand the technicalities. When you buy Windows, for example, you only have a licence to use it on one PC; when you buy Office, the licence lets you load it on two machines as long as you don't use both at once - unless it's a copy that came with your PC.

Andy Woolley, from Milonic, does not single out Hatch for blame. "In general, we have several thousand customers who have all adhered to the terms and conditions and pay their licence fees without problem. But when you look at the statistics, you see hundreds of thousands of downloads but very few actual sales; I estimate around one sale for every 500 downloads and I doubt very much only one of them is a commercial customer."

Commercial, corporate licences are often far more complicated, not least because every software company reckons them up differently. For desktop software, Apple has different tiers of licensing, depending on which band the number of users falls into.

When software runs on a server rather than a desktop, it's not always clear who counts as a "user", and some vendors define clients differently for different products. If your company database drives a website or cash tills, does every surfer or every cashier count as a database user? Server licences may cover a limited or unlimited number of users, or be based on the number of processors in the server running the software.

Roaming and hotdesking users increase the complexity. The BBC found it couldn't use centralised profiles to enable any user to use any machine on the worldwide BBC network so they wouldn't be affected by local disasters, because users logging off from a machine left behind "fragments" of licensed applications, breaking the terms and conditions.

Licences can't always be transferred to outsourcers. Custom software development has pitfalls, too; solicitor Dino Wilkinson points out that unless you write it into the contract, you can end up with the right to use the software but not the copyright. Open source doesn't always simplify things. Although the operating system is free to use, you will pay for support and you may have to pay for applications. Changes to source code usually have to be contributed back to the open source community.

Paul Brennan, of the Federation Against Software Theft, is sceptical of claims that understanding what licences you need can be difficult. "I do not see many breaches of licence due to confusion. As a famous store detective once said: 'I have seen many people so confused that they left the shop without paying, but I have never found anybody who got so confused that they paid twice.' With the right professional approach, confusion does not enter into it."

Microsoft's Sue Hogg disagrees. "It would be wrong of me to say licensing is really simple because it isn't, but customers have got choice in licensing. We could make it very simple tomorrow but it would be very restrictive."

She emphasises the importance of managing software licences: "I think there's a lot of confusion because people don't track it, don't perceive it as an asset. Often there's no process in place, they have to backtrack to find out what's been bought."

Managing software licences isn't just a case of doing an audit and keeping a database. Hogg compares it to losing a music CD; you can't get another copy just because you have your till receipt. Finding out what you've got, what you need and what users are running can save you money on what you don't use. Analysts at Gartner put average savings at around 30%, and the British Software Alliance refers to a company that saved £500,000. That's a more attractive prospect than the $44m European companies have already paid out for breaking software licences.

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