LONDON - Microsoft's U.S. Partners are furious at discovering that the Redmond behemoth is allowing a company called Disclic to sell used Microsoft licences through discount-licensing.com.
The firm sells these licences from other companies that are either downsizing or closing shop to third parties. The discount offered in almost 20 to 50 percent from what is generally available for brand new licences. Disclic has been able to carry on with this practice because of a large loophole in British insolvency laws as well as a clause contained within many of the licences distributed by Microsoft that allows disused or unwanted volume licences to be sold to third parties.
"It's such a new concept to the way people bought licences before, how people react in terms of the resellers and the users remains to be seen," said Jonathan Horley, director at discount-licensing.com.
Disclic approached Microsoft with its proposal 14 months ago and a Redmond spokeswoman confirmed that Disclic had their blessing. But this has shocked vendors who fear that Microsoft is taking a step too far, "This is certainly going to be a concern to us as we focus on giving our customers a complete value-add service. I don't know what kind of prices these guys are offering but if you can buy exactly the same licences at a third of the price that could be very damaging," Chris Lamb, software-licensing manager at Basilica said.
Microsoft did not comment on this incident, but Paul DeGroot, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft said that this practice was above board, "Microsoft's own Licensing site used to describe how to go about the transfer and people certainly do it on a small scale, but I don't know that it's ever been tried commercially. From Microsoft's perspective, you have to wonder how much money they've made selling new software, when perfectly good software has ended up in the landfill," he commented.
Posted
on : Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:45 GMT | General News
By : Pippa Fielding
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