IBM Software License Search
September 4, 2009
I do not know which vendor or software system provides the search plumbing for the IBM Software License Search system I stumbled upon today. I own a couple of ageing NetFinity servers, and I wanted to know if there were license agreements for the pre-loaded software on these once-high value servers. I located a software license “vertical” search service that contains only IBM licenses. This is a mixed blessing because I wanted to skip search from the licenses to the referenced component. I had to do this by opening another browser window and using the general purpose IBM search service which is not too hot in my opinion.
I ran a number of queries for NetFinity servers and discovered four hits from year 2000. I did not recognize any of the software descriptions as what came on or with my servers. My recollection was that I had Lotus Notes, a version of DB2, and several other products including the often flakey ServeRAID software. No joy.
I ran queries for proprietary, confidential, and software. I got zero hits on the word proprietary and zero hits for the word confidential. I ran a query for the word software, assuming I would get a set of results that would give me an idea about how many documents were in the vertical file. I got 193 hits. That seems small to me.
I ran a query for OmniFind and got 30 hits. The most recent was August 2008. This fact suggests to me that OmniFind like Oracle’s SES10g is getting ready for the rendering plant. I selected a hit about OmniFind. I did not get the license document. I got this page:
I made more selections and finally I got an unformatted text dump of the legal text. I found it very difficult to read with my 65 year old eyes. Instead of delivering a readable version of the document, IBM assumed that I could copy the document from the browser window, open Word or Framemaker, and insert the text and format it to my liking. Wrong.
I wrote this review. I can see that IBM has tried to deliver a subset within its almost unworkable full IBM wide search system. But good effort doesn’t earn an A in my search class.
Stephen Arnold, September 4, 2009
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