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From: roberson@ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca (Walter Roberson)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: Serious Question if You Have Experience with MatLab License Renewals
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:03:54 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: National Research Council Canada - Conseil national de rechereches Canada
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In article <2c62fdf9-ded4-4c51-9f95-c353546d2081@z72g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
junoexpress  <MTBrenneman@gmail.com> wrote:

>I work at a university where every year it seems it is a huge problem
>renewing our MatLab license. It seems to take forever to get done,
>sometimes it isn't done on time, and the people who rely very heavily
>on MatLab (I'm in an engineering dept)  are basically shut down.

>I can't get a straight reply from the IT
>people here as to how the ordering process works. Can anyone shed some
>light as to whether the license renewal process is that complicated
>and HOW LONG THE PROCESS SHOULD TAKE if done properly

When I was doing that work, Mathworks usually responded fairly quickly
with the new license keys once they had received our order; I don't
recall ever having to wait as long as a week. 2 to 3 days was typical then.


However, the truth was that there was a lot of time spent fudging
around between the various groups trying to decide how many licenses of
which type to order, with the groups typically wanting to cut the
software maintenance budgets as much as they could get away with, so we
(the systems administrators) would frequently have to negotiate with
them and do statistical analysis of the logs and otherwise prove to
them that their people really were using the software. They wanted the
-access- to the software: they just didn't want to pay for it out of
their own budget (and they didn't want our budget increased so we could
pay for it quickly and smoothly: that would have given our 3-person
support group a budget larger than most of the 20+ people research
groups.) Besides, when -we- (IT) paid for the licenses then we had a
tendancy to make the licenses available to all staff, which could mean
that the groups might not be able to get a floating license when they
wanted one, if the number of licenses required had been underestimated.
And around and around it went, money, and politics, and money politics.


In the time frame I was doing that work, Mathworks also changed the
licensing scheme, deprecating node-locked licenses in favour of group
licenses. There was a trade-in program, one node-locked license for
(something like) 5 group licenses, and the maintenance for node-locks
was deliberately pushed up to encourage us to switch. So there were
difficult predictive and financial decisions about what kind of
licenses to get.


Even now, the confusion about license types continues. Some of our work
is on grant-funded projects cross-polinated with universities, so some
of what we do qualities for academic licenses, and some of it doesn't.
Academic licenses are much less expensive, so IT people may find it
wise to request proof from groups that their work qualifies under the
acad terms: an IT person who knowingly allows the wrong license to be
used can be *personally* charged with ruinous copyright violation fines
(and potentially jail as well), so it is wise to CYA. Which takes
time.

If I recall correctly, merely being faculty or staff at a university is
not sufficient to qualify to use an academic license, not if the work
itself has commercial or government components (and commercial or
defence funding for a lot of research is a reality in many modern
universities.) So your IT people might be undergoing similar
struggles.

There are a number of different license types to manage, all with
different pricing. I don't mean to imply that Mathworks does not have
good reason for having all those licenses, but it does make it difficult
for an organization of any size to decide how many of each to get.
Do we get so-many floating licenses, or do we buy a workstation and get
a node-locked license for it and make people walk over to the
workstation to use it? And so on.
-- 
  "They called it golf because all the other four letter words
  were taken."                                    -- Walter Hagen