Software running on demo licence? At least one patty pusher is Lovin' It
- Reference: 1605874930
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/20/bork/
- Source link:
A case in point is McDonald's, which (at least as far as this outlet is concerned) seems to have a somewhat flexible approach to picking a licence for the point-of-sale systems adorning its drive-thrus.
Unless, of course DEMO is an acronym for "Do Eat McDs Often" – wise advice indeed from the patty pusher.
[1]
We first saw this particular Bork in the wild [2]back in February , just before the world went a bit mad and some (including this hack) were banished to the garden shed, AKA the home office. Back then, the afflicted terminal could be found in the fair northern England city of Manchester.
Little did we know that forgetting to pop on the production key was actually a harbinger of the coming borkpocalypse. We hesitate to think what yet another DEMO licence for K-POS might portend.
As for today's example, it was spotted by a Register reader taking a well-earned break at Junction 29a of the M1 motorway. The optimistically named "M1 Commerce Park" also features a KFC and Starbucks to fill the bladders and bowels of weary travellers before heading north to Sheffield or south to Derby.
The gloved employee seems unperturbed by the borkage, although judging by the state of the screen at least one or two customers had a McSplurry of their own when presented with the price of their greasy goodies. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/19/mcbork.jpg
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/21/borkborkbork/
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Phone home
Yes, this is a known issue, especially when the SW is licensed via a USB dongle "somewhere" on the network. Vectorworks... are you listening?
Re: Phone home
Good Lord! If I had a dollar for every time I took a support call where someone forgot to input the license key.....
Here is what happens, usually at renewal time... Purchasing agent renews the license. Software vendor sends license activation to purchasing agent because they signed the document. Purchasing agent, being a good bean counter, tucks the documentation safely away just in case they are ever audited.....never handing it off to the tech staff.
About 4:50pm on Friday, the big shot at the customer calls the sales droid. The sales droid calls their team in a panic. Some poor tech works late on Friday to backdoor the software in to demo mode on the customer's promise they will solve the problem on Monday. Pub, party, weekend, and no one remembers come Monday. Thirty or so days later...expired demo message.
Every damn time. Gimme my dollar!
I worked for a large British based PC seller in the late 90s early 2000s who used to use an unlicensed version of the DOS compression utility ARJ on their recovery CDs. The discs were shipped with every PC they sold, so we are talking probably a few million copies over the years. It clearly said in the license for ARJ they were shipping that it was not for commercial use, but no one seem to care. So after I left the company I reported it to FAST but i don't know if anything was every done about it.
Phone home
Missing or expired licences are not uncommonly caused by failures in the network, or failures in the licence server.
Last year I was one of an entire office of developers who were temporarily deprived of IntelliJ. It turned out that the licence server, being an undemanding and generally unregarded piece of software, had been hosted on a machine whose primary purpose was something totally unconnected. When the unconnected purpose was migrated to a new machine, the licence server was decommissioned along with the old machine.