Interactive and me - An open letter to ISC.

[Vernon Schryver]

In article <15684 at bfmny0.BFM.COM>, tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
> 
> In the case where you have multiple machines networked together,
> serialization does prevent (well, make harder anyway) you from buying
> one copy of the software and installing it everywhere.  That's the
> function of the "copyright daemon." ...


In another newsgroup/mailing list, there have been allegations that one
vendor's anti-theft scheme consists of a daemon every machine on the network
that very frequently broadcasts something.

I do not know if these allegations are true.  If they are, I would
sympathize those who say they refuse to allow machines with this
anti-social pathology to be connected to their networks.  On a large
network, it would be worse than the Apple crime.  The number of vendors of
UNIX for 386 machines means there would be no reason to tolerate it, unlike
the Apple protocol.

Given today's network monitoring tools, from LEDs on transceivers to
portable analyzers to network monitoring software that can run on many UNIX
and most DOS machines, such pollution would be painfully evident.

Given public domain IGMP, the ease of using link level multicasts, and
"lisense brokers" that can be lisensed HP/Apollo and several other
companies, there would be no excuse for an ethical programmer to implement
such a thing as has been alledged.


During the day, I have a little to do with a network of dozens of ethernets
with thousands of machines.  There is reason to think no machine on that
network is running software from the vendor in question.  I have seen more
than enough of the Apple broadcasts.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at calcite.uucp