[X4U] OSX and sharewhere programs

[Ed Gould]

On May 30, 2009, at 3:28 PM, Lars Bertelsen wrote:

> I don't see the issue...
> This is no different from any software in any company:
> - Either you purchase a number of single user licenses and install  
> them on the individual users' machines with a separate serial  
> number for each, or you buy a company wide license and install that  
> on all thge users' machines with the same serial number, whether  
> you ask all the users to type in the same serial number or you  
> distribute an installation with an embedded serial number to each  
> machine.
>
> Same thing here; the vendore decides wheter to install his settings  
> in /Library/Application Support or in /Users/<username>/Library/ 
> Application Support
> One would suspect that if it was the latter, then the idea is that  
> this license is meant for one user only.
>
> As far as I can see, the fact that several users may be sharing the  
> same physical machine is neither here nor there in this context.
>
> Oh and "per CPU" may be out of date, but I think you may take it to  
> mean "per phisycal machine" in almost all cases...
>
> Lars Bertelsen
----------SNIP------------

Lars:

Sorry for the delay in responding but I got this on 6/18 sigh  I wish  
I knew what was going on with the delay.

Well I am not sure and the terminology seems to be changing more  
quickly than I thought. Example (I think this is correct) VMWARE is  
charging per cpu and others are doing it similarly so there seems to  
be no one correct word (at least understood by everyone the same way).

My former working environment is different from the PC world and thus  
my views might be incorrect in the PC (or better small computer  
field). In "my land" a computer could have up to 51 cpu's in "one"  
box (the one is not really right in this context) and each cpu when  
queried  gave back a specific serial number. There are many reasons  
why you would not run this in a real world situation (technical  
reasons here and it really needs a book to be explained properly).  
The computer would normally be split up "logically" into probably 25  
or (less or more) systems.
So you may have one "box" and essentially have 25 operating systems  
running simultaneously. Like I said it gets technically interesting  
and difficult to explain. It is *NOT* a cloud environment at all (at  
least in my understanding of cloud computing) but let us say 25  
"environments" (there could be 25 different operating systems  
running. This is not done  by novices but by highly trained people  
who know and understand (most if not all of the issues and there are  
a LOT of issues believe me). So each operating environment typically  
has 2 or more cpu's (again 1 could be done but there are issues of  
only having 1 cpu per environment.

This 51 is a reasonably new number before it was typically 1-4. But  
to throw more confusion into this situation you were not limited (in  
reality  not quite) as to the number of environments, the only real  
limitation was the amount of memory you could attach, but  
theoretically you could have 500 (or more ) OS's running at the the  
same time. I will stop here as it gets more confusing.

The history behind given each cpu a serial number was for reasons  
that lets say are historical (long story not needed here) but that  
was the environment and simply put it was a way to charge for usage.

Ed