[p4] Multiple clients - single user

[David Weintraub]

Remember that Perforce's main competitor is not ClearCase, but Subversion.

Subversion beats Peforce on price (you can't get cheaper than free)
and ease of licensing (If you don't resell Subversion, you can
basically do whatever you want).

Perforce is convincing Subversion users that Perforce software and
support is worth the $800 per developer which compared to salary,
hardware support, and office space is cheap. Heck, you'd be hard
pressed to keep a software developer supplied with donuts for only
$800.

As for licensing, the fact that Perforce requires a license is already
makes Perforce licensing issues more than 100 times more complex than
Subversion, so Perforce attempts to make it as painless as possible.

Perforce offers its software on very reasonable terms and is very
generous in their license interpretation. Because of that, they've
built up a lot of good will and most companies are more than happy to
comply.

Their license is very simple: If you have a user who uses Perforce,
they should have a license. Licenses for backups, automatic processes,
etc. aren't their concern. If you have developers, they shouldn't
share a license.

On 6/17/07, DAVID Foglesong <defoglesong at msn.com> wrote:
> >From: Didster <didster at gmail.com>
> ...
> >But...  Not every "company" in the world takes software theft
> >seriously - and it just seemed to me that it's a strange decision to
> >make the license based on per-user rather than per-client when sharing
> >a user technically is possible and presents no problems from a
> >functional point of view - hence my question.
>
> Beyond the legal aspects, there are some real functional issues with using a
> single shared account. The most glaring one is that you have effectively no
> security. Since there's only one account, everyone has "super" access to the
> system.
>
> That means anyone can:
> - Run obliterate to permanently remove data from the system.
> - Edit the protect or trigger or typemap table.
> - Change (or delete) any label or client or branch spec. (Setting the
> "locked" option won't matter if you only have one account that owns all
> specs.)
> - Set a password on the single shared account and lock out everyone else.
>
> Having a single shared account will also make review daemons and
> bug-tracking (p4dti/jobs) pretty much useless.
>
> I doubt a 4-person shop would encounter this situation, but I can't imagine
> what a SOX or ISO compliance audit would think about using a single shared
> account for all changes made to the system.
>
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>


-- 
--
David Weintraub
qazwart at gmail.com