>An interesting question arose in my office. We are all licensed users of Visual Studio. On occasion, we may want(need) to bring some work home with us. Also, some of us are studying other parts of Visual Studio (VB primarily), and would like a copy of the software on our home computer to play with. We don't all have a couplke hundred of dollars to spend on an application which we will not be using much.
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>Someone on our team informed us that there is a loophole of sorts in most software licensing agreements. The way it was explained to me, when you buy a software license, it does not mean that it can only be installed on one machine; it means that the licensed software can only be running on one machine AT A TIME.
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>If I use the software on my work desktop machine from 8:00am to 6:00pm, run the same license on my notebook computer from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, then run the same software license on my home machine from 8:00pm to 11:30pm, I am perfectly within the license agreement. Although the same software license is installed on multiple machines, only one copy of the licensed software is running at any time, and it is being run by the license holder.
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>I have not done the actual legal research to determine if this is kosher, and so far I have not installed my work copy on my home computer. What are your thoughts on the matter, and is this something that you yourself do?
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>Bill

This really depends on the way the license is written. Microsoft used to sell the Office license on a per-use basis, so if you buy 10 copies, you can have 10 users running the software at the same time, even if the software is loaded on 20 computers. Microsoft has now stopped this type of licensing, and requires you to buy 20 copies. So, you need to read the license carefully to determine what your rights are.