Re: User licensing for web access

On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 1:31 PM, Peter Dow <petercdow@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Nathan,

That document says

"AnIBM i user is a person who accesses theIBM i operating system through
one or more connections."

It's the first sentence. There are no qualifications about exchanging
credentials of any sort. Nor does it qualify "connections".

In regard to "there are no qualifications" in the first sentence, I would
suggest that you read the whole document. A single sentence taken out
context would lead to a misinterpretation, which appears to be Rob's
problem. Any interpretation should be made within the context of the whole
document, plus references embedded therein, in order to be on solid ground.

So if your IBM i makes a service publicly available via sockets with no

credentials exchanged, say to obtain the current price of tiddly winks from
Timbuctu, and someone else has a website that uses that service to provide
said information to their users, my question is who is the IBM i user? The
actual user on the non-IBM i website? Or the non-IBM i website?

IBM defines user entitlements for people who (a) have IBM i credentials,
and (b) exchange their credentials either directly or indirectly with IBM i.

In that scenario you indicate that neither (a) nor (b) are met. Does that
answer your question?

In either case, you could get a boatload of connections lasting 1-2 seconds

each that would be non-concurrent, so if you got a license for oh I don't
know, 5 users?, how many non-concurrent connections could you handle in a
day?

I haven't read anything from IBM that would suggest that user entitlements
are based in any way on number of socket connections, nor number of I/O
operations.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, but if you choose to believe the second

sentence "The user exchanges credentials (user identifications) either
directly with the operating system, or indirectly through application or
middleware software that is supported by the operating system."

has something to do with the definition of an IBM i user, then I would
point out that in the above scenario, no user credentials were exchanged,
except once by the socket server job.

What do you mean by "except once by the socket server job". That doesn't
sound like an HTTP connection. That sounds more like the external web
service may be connecting with QZDASOINT jobs.

And one last thing - if I were really concerned about this, I'd get a good
lawyer to look at the actual legal contract, not just some IBM website.

What contract? It appears to me that the license terms are on the web site.
Either you're inline with the terms, or not. I don't find the terms hard to
understand. The part I don't understand are statements made on Midrange
lists that appear to be out of alignment. For example, assertions about
users connecting through HTTP being required to have a user-based
entitlement, even when they may have no IBM i credentials, nor do they
exchange any credentials directly nor indirectly with IBM i.