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Children's Hospital fights software company demanding payment for software the hospital hasn't used in a decade

Children's Hospital this week sued a Seattle-based software company to get it to back off from claims the hospital owes $925,000 for "terminal emulator" software the hospital last used in 2004.

In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Boston, the hospital tells Attachmate what it can do with its Reflection software, which the hospital stopped using when it abandoned the Digital VAX mini-computers that formed the heart of its e-mail and clinical-data systems until 2004 - and accuses the company of relying on overzealous compliance staffers who get paid "substantial bonuses" for charging companies for alleged unpaid use of Attachmate software.

"Reflection software has been useless to the Hospital for more than a decade," the hospital says:

In or around 2004, the Hospital began using newer, more modern servers, and its employees stopped using the Reflection terminal emulator to access the older server clusters. IT staff still occasionally accessed the older servers as needed, but, on information and belief, they did so only at the database level; they did not use the Reflection software.

In 2006, the Hospital took the older server clusters out of service altogether. Since the only function the Reflection software then performed at the Hospital was to access those servers, it is beyond dispute that the Hospital has not used the software at issue since 2006, nor could it.

The hospital says that in October, 2014, it agreed to run an Attachmate software audit across its network to see if there were any unauthorized copies of Reflection softwaare still running - and that it was shocked to get a demand for $925,000 for allegedly running software it hadn't paid for - a figure that includes 15 years of interest at 12% a year.

On information and belief, the Hospital obtained each version of the Reflection software found on its systems from WRQ, Attachmate, or its reseller in a legitimate commercial transaction in return for payment.

According to Attachmate, however, the Hospital did not purchase even one license for version 8 of Reflection for Multi-Host Enterprise Standard Edition, even though it allegedly had hundreds of copies of the program on its computers. Meanwhile, it had thousands of licenses for components of the Multi-Host suite, but no copies of that software anywhere on its computers. To any reasonable person acting in good faith, these facts would indicate that the hospital had, in fact, purchased licenses for all of the software it deployed.

But Attachmate's compliance personnel did not adopt or even suggest this commonsense conclusion.

Children's wants a judge to tell Attachmate to leave it alone, specifically, that it did nothing wrong and owes Attachmate nothing - and that even if it did, waiting 10 years to claim damages is just too long.

On information and belief, Attachmate’s current business model intentionally exploits its own failures of record-keeping and the routine destruction of historical business records by its current and former customers to extract exorbitant software licensing fees from those customers based on unsupported allegations of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

Terre Haute hospital sues Attachmate

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Comments

google download putty

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I use Putty for those times I need to telnet into the Universal Hub Server of Solitude, but part of the point of the hospital's lawsuit is that they haven't needed to let the average end user connect to a server in a text window since 2004.

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putty doesn't support some common terminal emulators like x3270, that are still commonly used at least in academic/mainframe settings

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wc3270 is free, as is tn5250

that being said, mainframes need to go away.

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     ( they never should have agreed to the "software audit" diagnostic tests )

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I probably am one of the top users of "terminal emulators" who comments on this website, being a Linux nerd myself. $925,000 is a hilarious price for what is really the most basic of software utilities. Bet that was some kickass vt100.

Digital VAX mini-computers that formed the heart of its e-mail and clinical-data systems until 2004

The very best of technology serving your healthcare needs. Circa 1975.

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"VAX" computers were sold well into the 90's and 2000's; the nameplate was applied to alpha based systems, and they were at the time state of the art. So yeah, actually, it would be a great platform for something that's so important that if it fails, people's health is at risk.

There is a common misconception that "mainframe" = "old." Many, many things in this world run on mainframe hardware that is nowhere near 40 years old.

Some of those mainframe systems have an ability to move and manipulate data at a rate that simply isn't possible with microcomputer-architecture systems, and they do it at a speed and

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You have to get the words right. Mainframe=old but cloud=trendy. How is Amazon cloud that different from a mainframe?

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But for the people running it, I would think a single mainframe is a bit of a different beast than a vast room filled with thousands of motherboards networked together.

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I'm curious - why do you call mainframe old?

You can run Linux on it.
It can be used as a web server.
Just about any financial transaction you run these days is mainframe-based.

And I don't get this statement:

How is Amazon cloud that different from a mainframe?

You seem to be confusing mainframes (a processor architecture) with cloud (a data storage method). Two totally independent discussions.

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very true. Furthermore, there is such a thing as
"mainframe in the cloud", further confusing the issue :)

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Object-oriented COBOL.

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Cloud computing (see Amazon Web Services) offers processor architectures that you configure through their website and then they grant you access to what you setup for a small fee (and in small enough use cases it's straight-up free!). You don't have to manage the hardware or certain aspects of the software, but you get full use via your choice of protocols to a computer somewhere in their data centers. "Cloud" doesn't just mean data storage. It's a HUGE range of hardware as a service options.

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I immediately assumed "cloud storage" - just my frame of mind.

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the "high availability" and reliability of a mainframe is pretty much a lie at this point.. We have this great thing called a "cluster" now which solves the whole "reliability" issue that old people are fond of presenting as an excuse to keep this garbage around.

also, the data manipulation has pretty much been surpassed by redis/memcached and hadoop. in terms of $ cost of maintaining mainframes (and their specialized coders)

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For most users these days, maintaining the hardware isn't worth the money of the IT staff or the hardware itself. Just use AWS or similar cloud computing option and do away with all the high overhead and just rent the time necessary for much less than the cost to own and upkeep and staff.

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IBM HACMP was released in 1991 (written locally at CLAM Associates btw) and VAX clusters were around in the mid 80's.

You can throw all the stones you want at Mainframes--I have no dog in that fight. But I've been doing clustering and HA since Dubya's daddy was president. It's not exactly the latest thing to hit IT.

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Considering that DEC went basically defunct by the late 90s and was purchased by Compaq a little bit thereafter, I don't think it would have been a very good decision to buy anything "VAX" at that point for critical systems, mainframe regardless.

Random note: I picked up a used Alpha 21064-based workstation around 2002 for reasons that I cannot recall anymore. Perhaps it was morbid curiosity. Or maybe I had grand designs about programming on a 64-bit RISC architecture that never panned out. In the end it just turned into an expensive table.

By the way, if you haven't looked up the web page for this "Attachmate terminal emulation" software, you should. Quite funny, in that sad, "they're trying too hard" way.

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Is like collecting $5/car in a free parking lot.

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They don't care if you've not used it, you agreed to keep paying them, and they demand the money.

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They didn't agree to keep paying.

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This is pretty much why proprietary software should die. I've tried diligently to manage software licenses from some of these sorts of companies and they make it virtually impossible for you to verify it yourself and they won't clearly list what they believe you own. Their "audits" are similarly opaque and useless. They also usually make it virtually impossible to drop the quantities of support and then threaten legal action if you don't fork over the cash. Old software basically becomes an extortion racket. I hope Children's Hospital kicks their ass in court.

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Isn't this on par with a lot of patent troll "companies"? Attachmate, what would you say you do around here?

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