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.)