CIO Magazine: Let’s Stop Wasting $78 Billion A Year

“Some other IT users have resorted to more extreme
measures?such as withholding payments to put pressure on
vendors?but new legislation may soon make it harder for CIOs to
employ such brute financial tactics. The uniform computer
information transactions act (UCITA) makes it harder for customers
to sue vendors and allows vendors to more easily change contract
terms. The UCITA has already been passed in Virginia and Maryland
and is under consideration in seven other states and the District
of Columbia.

Fortunately, there are a host of alternative solutions on the
horizon, and a growing number of CIOs are determined to make them a
reality. They include renewable licensing agreements, in which CIOs
purchase the right to use software for two to three years at about
85 percent of the cost of what they’d pay under a perpetual
license. CIOs then have the option to renew the license at the end
of the term if they’re happy with the quality of the product and
the support. Subscription licensing agreements are similar to
renewable licenses, except the term is shorter, lasting about a
year, and CIOs rent the software, as opposed to owning it.

Finally, some CIOs are opting to circumnavigate packaged
software wherever possible. They’re turning to open-source
technologies such as the GNU and Linux operating systems, the
Apache Web server and Sendmail e-mail. “People are not involved
with [the open-source movement] for profit; they’re involved with
it because they want to write good product,” says Bill Lessard,
coauthor of NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web and a former
developer for Prodigy and AOL Time Warner. ‘If software makers see
they are losing money to people going the open-source route, then
they will change. Until then, it will be business as usual despite
appearances.'”

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