Most of software is subject to various license regulations. According to current policy every employee or student of the University carries personal responsibility for obeying corresponding license regulations, in first hand those concerning using and copying/installing of copyrighted software. This is an informatioin document about handling licensed software available under campus-wide site license agreements as well as local site/group licenses.
Fysikdatorn assures that all programs installed centrally on network server are legal and the right to use this software is granted to the legitimate users of Fysikdatorn. In most cases access to commercial software is controlled by so called network license when the right to use software is granted by a license server only for the period of actual execution of corresponding program. This makes it possible to minimize the number of required licenses and consequently the cost of ownership. For more information see local program catalog. Unlike shared application software copy of operating system is installed on every computer and has to be paid for on per-workstation basis. SPARC Solaris users pay their yearly fees to Sun via Fysikdatorn. It is the reponsibility of users of other OSes to make sure their copies of the operatings system are legal.
Unlike UNIX licensing, the administration of licenses for personal computers is more difficult since we cannot use network licenses, i.e. licenses has to be purchased and administered on per computer basis. To make sure that this is handled legally it is Chalmers policy that each institution have one "licensansvarig" who purchases and/or registers every licensed PC/Mac program. Only the "licensanvarig" have the password necessary to download programs from IMS Akademidatas server http://www.got.ims.se/licens/ and is responsible for purchasing, installing, registering the users and reporting to IMS Akademidata so they can bill corresponding unit. More information about the CTH policy on licensed software is available on their info pages as well as on a new (990319) page http://licenser.adm.gu.se/ and instructions for licensansvariga can be found at http://www.adm.chalmers.se/Intern/Lickom/Licansvar.htm.
The ``licensansvariga'' at each institution may contact Kristoffer Johansson who will try to help him/her to get started with the downloading task. Fysikdatorn does not have nearly enough staff to administer and install the software for the 400 PC's and Macintoshes that are registered in the Physics Department and who are all required to have legal licenses for their programs.