Re: Licencing for BPCS source

There is a potential flaw in this legal argument.

When our company was running on MAPICS, prior to converting to BPCS, I was
doing modifications where code had been copied from multiple different
companies source code, so the legal argument that ONE of those companies
owns the code when the contract expires, is not valid. The different
companies (whose source was used) might not have a legal right to see each
other's code. Only customers, with contracts with rights to use their
source code, has that legal right, so long as the contract is in place.

One day my boss informs me that the company has decided that the value, we
are getting from one of those sources, has been judged to be not worth the
annual fees, so we are terminating the contract, and I need to remove from
our system, all of their code. That included all programs which were using
derivative code from that source.

It is a real good job that all those programs had a copyright statement in
front for each and every places from which I had derived source code, so I
could scan for those instances. If a company has had programmers who were
sloppy about such things, it might not be possible to locate all such
derivative code instances.

Another wrinkle is whether the contract permits access to their files (with
our data) by means other than their software, such as us using query/400,
other IBM tools, purchased add-ons from outfits other than Infor.

-----Original Message-----
From: bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Rene van Besouw
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 1:21 AM
To: bpcs-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [BPCS-L] Licencing for BPCS source

When we bought BPCS many years ago, in the contract the definition for
Software included source code. A few years ago we signed at standard OGS
agreement for 3 years, which had a line (unnoticed at the time) to say
the base agreement was linked to another contract we have with Infor
where software is defined as object format only. We were recently
audited, and told we were using BPCS source illegally, and they wanted
to charge us for the use of source code. To cut a long story short, the
charge was waived (as we had licenses to AS/SET for a period), but they
are forcing us to remove source code, and hand over all our
modifications to the local affiliate for safe keeping, which will be
used when and if we upgrade again.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Does the fact that new contracts
specify object code only, mean we have to remove source code that we
have?(which was legally supplied to us in the past)



Rene van Besouw

Parmalat South Africa