Licence to crusade
Software EULAs and aggressive audits have put customers on the back foot, but a new body is battling for the end user.
Are there not enough lobby groups fighting on licensing issues? A new one, though, appears to be different. CRN spoke to the Campaign for Clear Licensing's recently capped chief executive, former Snow Software boss Mark Flynn, to find out more.
It was Martin Thompson at the IT Asset Management (ITAM) Review, and an article he wrote about 12 months ago which was the catalyst for the campaign, according to Flynn. Thompson later approached Flynn to lead the new body, which is not for profit, and at the time of writing he had been at the helm as chief executive for about six weeks.
It is partly about the "aggressive auditing techniques" of some software publishers, he explains, as well as licensing issues per se. Audits are believed by Gartner to account for about six per cent and rising of software revenue worldwide.
"That has generated a lot of interest globally - not just in the UK," he says.
"The campaign at the minute is in its formative stages. We don't have a business plan in place, which is exciting, but we are recruiting members on a global scale - reflecting the current ITAM Review membership base, from the US, Australia, India, France, the Netherlands and the UK. Members may include a range of channel companies from resellers to systems integrators, developers and manufacturers.
"We are looking for partners as well, because in the founding of the Campaign for Clear Licensing, we are not dependent on any particular software publisher or group of software publishers. We are an independent not-for-profit organisation."
End-user issues with software licensing are very common, he says, and have long been forced to focus on complex licensing agreements they do not truly understand. Either that, or pay a lawyer to interpret them - which few smaller companies (in other words, the bulk of business customers) can afford to do regularly.
"Often they cannot afford to reach out to a channel partner or the vendors either - because that may well set alarm bells ringing," Flynn notes.
One implication is profit-focused vendors or suppliers that see customers with licensing issues may see this primarily as an up-selling opportunity for themselves, rather than a chance to help the customer. Suppliers may choose simply to raise their prices in accordance with an expanding demand for support - or target customers with an audit, resulting in yet more costs.
"And then they can be faced with these quite aggressive audits," Flynn (pictured, right) adds.
"It's a bad place for them to be. People can literally be in tears about these issues. I believe this resonates across the market."
Software licensing complexity is pretty much across the board, he says, and the difficulties are compounded by the increasing number of applications - all often interacting together in opaque or subtle ways from the end user's perspective - that organisations have adopted. This situation has been exacerbated, it is almost needless to say, by the rise of cloud computing and everything-as-a-service.
"But we are not there to beat up on the software vendors or on business leaders in terms of trying to break them," Flynn hastens to add. "We are pro-software. Our concerns are pro-software, in how to drive their businesses and enable suppliers to continue to innovate in the market. Our members want that to continue; they want innovative software."
That said, certain software licensing practices by some publishers appear to be taking advantage of the end user such that they cannot easily go elsewhere or see exactly what they have agreed to. There is a vast, unsatisfied need for clarity and to better address the needs of the end user, who has been - or seemed - largely silent in a world of widespread and prolific channel, vendor and analyst comment and influence.
The biggest stick could be exposure of vendor behaviour.
"We want vendors to take notice. There hasn't been a collective representation of the end-user market. For vendors, there have been representatives - the likes of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) - and we are behind that; we've got no beef with those bodies," Flynn says.
"We [the members] have been in and around software publishing for a long time, but across the board, licensing agreements are complex and they have needed to be complicated for good reason, because when you're trying to cope with everybody's needs, it becomes complex by its very nature."
Stand up and shout
What this means is end users - perhaps through bodies such as the Campaign for Clear Licensing - having more of a voice and being more organised, in ways that actually help end users to work with the industry.
In doing so, they hope to come up with appropriate solutions to complexity, and help end-user customers reduce their exposure to aggressive audits of the kind that can appear to be a kind of sword of Damocles, hanging over the head of companies large and small ready to descend at any time and for apparently slight reasons.
Membership of the Guildford-based Campaign for Clear Licensing - soon launching chapters in Germany and the US - however, doesn't come cheap, although it will also hold events to raise funds. Corporate end-user organisations must stump up ￡2,500 per year to get access to the entire range of services, Flynn says, and Premium Partners in certain instances a cool ￡7,500.
That also means signing up to a code of conduct. "We need them to engage with end-user organisations, in a positive way," he says.
Flynn says vendors are not as aware as they should be that end users have issues with software licensing.
"Software publishers don't know these things. They feel they're doing a great job - and by and large they are," he says.
"Yet organisations want to embrace change and do more on software, but they feel they don't understand the implications of the licensing."
Flynn points to examples such as the Tibco-Bank of America suit. The Bank of America allegedly copied $300m-worth of Tibco enterprise software as part of an IT project at its subsidiary Merrill Lynch, and did so illegally according to Tibco. The case is in the US courts, and the defendant argues that it did not know what it was doing infringed upon the rights of the vendor.
According to media reports, Merrill Lynch had stockpiled Tibco software before the licence expired in February 2013 - and used the software after it had expired. Bank of America spokesman Mark Pipitone was quoted as responding: "We have a long history of positive relationships with our third-party partners. In accordance with that, we have acted in good faith to observe the scope of Tibco's licence at all times, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves."
If the Bank of America - the second-largest banking corporation in the US, with quarterly revenues of $22bn (￡13.3bn) - cannot keep tabs on its software licensing, what hope do the far more numerous SMBs have around the globe? Smaller businesses can be and are targeted for auditing by vendors as well as by organisations such as the BSA.