Licenses For Hardware (was RE: [Asterisk-Users] Vonage)

[Eric Thompson]

Jon Pounder wrote:

> A feature restricting licence for hardware is a moronic concept.


I'll agree wholeheartedly that it's sleazy, but to avoid putting too
fine a point on the issue, the Cisco license, if it's like other
licenses for products with embedded firmware, is for the software
running on the hardware, not for the hardware itself.

There are a couple of lawsuits being argued right now, one of which
involves the manufacturer of some DSL equipment, a defunct DSL service
provider and one of the service provider's financial backers.  When the
ISP went tits-up, the backers repossessed a bunch of CPE and attempted
to sell it on the surplus market.  The manufacturer of the equipment
stepped in and said "oh, no....sorry, but the license for the firmware
doesn't come with these, so you can't sell them until you remove it or
otherwise render it inoperable".

The courts have held two positions;  one is that these terms were agreed
to by the original purchaser of the equipment, so they're valid, and
another court has held that there's no way to separate the software from
the hardware, so it's unenforceable.  The appellate decisions aren't all
in yet, to my memory.  

The crucial question here is whether or not the software is separable
from the hardware.  In the case of the ATA-186, it appears that at least
some of the functionality is based on separable software, in which case
using those functions that don't rely on such code is probably not a
violation of the license.  Put another way, if you were to write new
code that completely replaced the dynamically-installed licensed code,
you'd probably be in the clear WRT the inseparable code.

Eric, Who Is Not A Lawyer