Re: IBM is so confusing!

On 2/10/2011 11:03 PM, MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Sorry Joe, but that's not entirely true. RDPi isn't covered by the
general SWMA on IBM i. It has it's own separate additional SWMA. We
finally got this all straightened out so we can plan for it when we
finally bite the bullet on the 6.1 or 7.1 upgrade from V5R4. ADTS seats
(as well as all the host-based tools--read compilers, et al) while
licensed individually are covered--in blanket--by the general SWMA on IBM
i. That is they are treated just like they used to be and you pay by the
processor tier. RDP seats aren't included--you pay maintenance for these
by the seat. So it's not a one-time cost either. If you want to continue
to license RDP and get upgrades, you pay software maintenance on it
annually.

But you've probably done more than me on this. If there's another way to
have the maintenance on RDP covered by the general SWMA, I would love to
hear about it because it would help take some of the cost-sting out of the
upgrade. Our BP was very clear that we pay for it over and over and over
and over.

It was my understanding that SWMA would be based on your total OS price, which included the per-seat costs of ADTS seats. That's what I was told, although I haven't priced it out. George Farr was pretty clear on the point during the 6.1 rollout, but that was a long time ago and things may have changed.

I wrote an article based entirely on conversations with George Farr who was very involved with the whole pricing situation:

http://www.mcpressonline.com/programming/dev-tools/ad-repackaging-in-v6r1.html

Even then the situation was not 100% solid, but George clearly outlined the various possibilities for SWMA and at the time was very specific about how entitlements and seat pricing would work. There was a specific concern that if you got all the seats you were entitled to, your SWMA would jump significantly. I guarantee that RDP will never be a general SWMA, but at the time the discussion was that ADTS would require a SWMA based on number of seats.

Are you certain that ADTS seats are not being charged SWMA by seat? If so, I'll have to take your word for it until I check one out myself. I hesitate to actually bug IBM; if this is just an oversight I'd hate to be the one to bring it to their attention!

It is, I suppose, entirely possible that IBM decided not to charge SWMA on individual ADTS seats for customers who upgrade from pre-6.1 releases. Or maybe they're not charging SWMA on ADTS seats at all, even for new customers. I just don't know. I do know that we were all quite miffed about the compilers being licensed by seat, so maybe they decided it was too difficult and just dropped the whole SWMA by seat for any of the host-based products. Nothing IBM does in the licensing department would surprise me.

Joe