23rd August, 2001.

"This license agreement says we can use this for development but not for production, and because I'm doing a PR course at university right now, I think this is obviously a marketing tool."
 
"Fine, but the license agreement still says we have to pay for it as soon as we use it in production."

"But I don't think they mean it, because it's just a marketing tool."

"Okay, but that's not what the license agreement says and we still have to pay for it as soon as we use it for anything more than development."

"But I see it as a marketing tool *and* a development tool, so anything we use it for will be for development and not production."

"Obviously the vendor doesn't see it that way, or they wouldn't distinguish between production and development in this bit of paper you keep waving about in front of me." There follows a brief and apparently fruitless explanation of the difference between production use and development use.

"They don't mean it, because it's really only a marketing tool. Besides, it doesn't specifically refer to this package in the license - it only refers to The Software."

"What does it say on the front of the pamphlet?"

"End-User License Agreement for Bonus CDs."

"Which includes...?"
 
"This one, but it's really only a marketing tool. I'm sure they don't really expect us to pay for it if we start getting productive use out of it. And how would they know, anyway?"

[Momentary silence while I absorb the monumental stupidity of this last question. Seventy-five percent of Cow-Orker's job revolves around license management and software compliance - to have her suddenly declare that, in effect, "it only matters if we get caught" makes me wonder just what she thinks she's paid to do here. Apart from making my life hell, that is.]
 
"They might find out through an external audit, or they might not. That's not the point. Using it that way would be in breach of license and that's the sort of thing we're trying to avoid. It's why I went to that software management course last year, and why I recommended that you go - avoiding that kind of casual piracy is what our positions are about."

"But can you see where I'm coming from?

Yes, but I'm hoping by the time you start approaching our atmosphere there'll be enough warning and enough missiles to ensure you never set foot on my planet.

"They're obviously giving it to us for free so that we'll be so impressed we'll rush out and buy their enterprise product, except we already have a site license for that so we won't need to pay for anything at all! Isn't that great?"
 
"What about the production work we've done with it?"
 
"But because I think this is a development tool, anything we use this for will be development and will have been done during the development phase, so even if we're using it in production we don't need to pay for it."

"Just like if we install an unregistered copy of, say, Photoshop, create a Photoshop document and then uninstall the programme - we haven't really committed software piracy?"
 
"Oh, would it really be like that? But it's just a marketing tool like the kind we've been talking about in my classes at university."

Eventually she retreated, still disagreeing (thank God I hid the spare chair that used to be in my area - not being able to sit down meant she couldn't make herself comfortable to continue arguing). Since then she's gone through to deliver a summary of our disagreement to our manager, and has just discussed it at further length on the phone with her father, who runs a failing computer store and apparently agrees with her interpretation.

Sigh.