Techdirt:You Don't Own What You've Bought

Techdirt has an interesting article and discussion about how people are being strong armed by Cisco into buying support and IOS for equipment they bought on Ebay. This sounds to me like the tactics IBM was using back when they were in a similar position with mainframes. The techdirt piece links to this article on infoworld, which is also discussing this issue. Here is a quote from the techdirt article:

Just a sad reminder that, thanks to ridiculous software licensing practices, if you buy used equipment on eBay, you might not be able to use it. In fact, if it's from some companies like Cisco, you might want to make sure you hide it from anyone who works there. People who have bought used equipment, and then had the original company find out about it are discovering that the company is saying their software license is not valid and they need to buy a new one - even though the equipment was already paid for by the original owner.

Here is a quote from the original infoworld article:

“We encountered this fate with Cisco last year when we bought out the equipment of a [failed] dot-com,” said one IT manager who asked not to be named. “When we tried to get the used Cisco equipment relicensed, we found it would cost us as much as if we bought the equipment new.”