>The Company I work for have found a problem with their release version of the software which cannot be reproduced in the development environment.
>
>They are now proposing to ship out parts if not all of the Development environment for VFP6SP5.
>
>My question is: is this legally acceptable?
>
>Regards
>Simon


I'm not a lawyer, but if you are talking about VFP6 SP5 software, from a license standpoint, I would think that this would only be permissible if you are transferring the license to the new recipient. Transter would only be permissible IF it has NOT been used to qualify for an upgrade version of VFP AND you have completely removed it from your development machine(s) AND you also transfer all copies of the Software and documentation. You can't retain a copy of the software or documentation or continue to use the software. IMO, That should be permissible under the license agreement only of those conditions are met. If you are still using the VFP6 SP5 for development or maintenance, then you cannot transfer it to anyone else. I would suggest looking for surplus software, look on Ebay, or post a message requesting to buy a used VFP6 version from someone who can meet the conditions required to legally transfer the license.

Be very careful with this. You don't want the "Software Cops" after you. I think MS recently has started putting in "Phone Home" capabilitites in some of their more recent products designed to detect pirated copies. Whether they look at more than the software that it was installed with, I don't know, but just how MS is using the info collected is anyone's guess. All I know, is that when I first got my home computer with XP, it would dial out to my ISP, connect to MS site to get updates and do other unknown things while I was not using the computer. A guy I know got an illegal copy of the XP OS corporate licensed and installed it. It installed fine and did not require the normal first time online verification / registration and worked fine for months until he tried to download the SP1 update and it balked saying that the OS was an illegal copy of Window XP.


If you are talking about sending your source code, I don't think that would be a very good idea. You should investigate further and try harder to reproduce the problem.