Thursday, March 26, 2009

Lotus Foundations licencing discriminates against Macs?

While trolling through the Lotus Foundations on-line help files (Alright! I admit it! I don't have a social life!) I came across the following anomoly:

*****************************************************
A Lotus Foundations Start CAL includes a license to run a subset of available desktop clients. The supported options are:

* Lotus Notes 8.x Standard for Windows
* Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) 8.x for Windows
* Lotus Notes 7.0.2 for Mac

A number of client options are not covered by this license. These include, but are not limited to:

* Lotus Domino Administrator & Designer
* Lotus Notes for Linux
* Lotus Notes 8.x for Mac

*****************************************************

I can understand that the Admin and Designer clients need a separately purchased CAL and I can almost twist logic sufficiently to forgive Lotus for excluding all Linux clients for technical compatibility reasons, but can someone from Lotus explain why you can give a user Notes 7.02 on a Mac as a valid Foundations CAL but if you upgrade their Notes to the same R8 version as the rest of your Foundations community then you need another CAL?
.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that is easy to explain. This dokument you are refering to, was updated the last time 5th of march. Until yesterday, there was no Notes 8.0.1 for Mac.
Since we are now on Domino 8.5 also on foundations, that will change soon and we will get the Notes 8.5 Client for Mac.

Anonymous said...

... and if you read the licence for V1.1 there is only mentioned Lotus Notes. Therefore the Mac client 8.5 is included.
Cheers

Graham Dodge said...

Not sure I agree with your logic. The original Nitix document specifically denied entitlement for R8 for the Mac but permitted installation of R7. So the Powers-That-Be anticipated that both Mac versions would be simultaneously available.

It's a minor point - I'm just curious why they said it in the first place.

Christian Tillmanns said...

Ups, sorry Graham, but I don't remember a 8.0.X Client for Mac.
As far as I know - and I can't see anything else in the PW - 8.5 is the first V8 client for Mac.

Graham Dodge said...

I don't run a Mac so I'm not in tune with the current or past Notes versions for that platform. My quote just was a cut-and-paste from the Foundations doco which clearly permits R7 Mac but not R8 Mac.

It's an intriguing anomoly (or blooper) but IMHO not worth chasing IBM down to see what they actually meant.