license question

[intern06]

I'm an intern at a company that recetnyl acquired a business that used a Unix system. After a whole lot of work, and many posts on these forums, I figured out how to ftp the files off the system. The company now wants to get rid of the system and I've been asked to find out if there's any value in it.

First of all, the system is an HP Visualize C160 (which I've already determined is fairly without value) running HP-UX B10.20. We have a license and, according to some notes from the person who used the system at the previous company, pay $11,000/yr for the license. This sounds extremely high to me so I'm assuming it's probably a multi-user license.

Just to be safe, assuming that it's a single-user license what would be the approximate value? Also, is a license even transferrable?

[Christian Tremblay]

HP-UX 10.20 is almost 10 years old and not supported anymore.

I doubt that it has any value at all, but you may try your luck on Ebay ;-)

[Pete Randall]

The $11,000 per year is probably for maintenance and support rather than for the license. Since 10.20 is no longer supported by HP and the C160 will probably not be supported for much longer, your $11,000 fee will soon be disappearing, I would think.


Pete

[Torsten.]

Seems to be a licence for a special software installed, not the operating system.

[intern06]

Aha! You're right. I bet it's for the unigraphics CAD software that's installed!

In looking at the posts, it sounds like it's barely going to be even worth my time to type up a listing on ebay?

I work at a small company, but they do good business so putting in a lot of effort to list, ship, etc. the software only to make $50 or so would not be worth the time. Should I not waste my time?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

These boxes were often used for CAD/CAM/Analysis tasks. $11K/yr for high-end CAD or Finite Element Analysis or Computational Fluid Dynamics is not at all unusual for a single-seat license.

Whether or not it makes sense to pay that for an obsolete box (especially if no one in your current company knows what to do with it) is an entirely different question.
You need to find the license agreement because what you are probably paying is annual software maintenance fees and if you let it lapse; you might be looking at $100K to replace the software.

[Pete Randall]

I would think you're unlikely to get more than $100 for it - probably less. You could keep it around as a curiosity.


Pete

[Torsten.]

You can get some money if you sell it part by part as used parts or you keep it if you want to learn using HP-UX. It's not that bad (and better than my machine).

[Alzhy]

Well if your company still uses that software albeit on a different platform - why not just simply transfer its license.?

Many many UNIX based CAD/CAM "workstations" have migrated to either Windows or Linux based platforms with thise speedier X86-64 cpus.