Hi Ariane,
This is a tricky area because there are many little things that can affect the transaction, and there are some issues about how to register a transfer properly. For the most part you need the whole chain of things to be correct for the licensing to be valid. If there is significant risk to your organization in getting this wrong, you should check with a lawyer. I've researched this for an org before, but they didn't go ahead with the donation because what was being offered didn't seem to fit.
I got most of the info on transfers from the site: http://www.microsoftsale.com
Here's my understanding - It is possible to legally transfer some types of volume licensing. The most common type of MS volume licensing for small businesses is Open licensing (and that's all I really have experience in - so the rest of this is all about Open licensing. If that's not what you're being offered, ignore the rest of this).
- Not having disks with the software on is not a legal problem. It may be hard for you to get disks at a later date though. you can legally make copies of the software if you're licensed, so you could copy the disks your donor is wanting to use. I would question why the donor is prepared to donate the software to you but not the disks s/he will use to load the machines with (there are some good explanations for this, but it raises a flag).
- When someone purchases MS Open licensing they open up an authorization number (sort of like a licensing account). You can make several purchases under this authorization number. When transferring ownership *everything* purchased under that authorization number needs to be transferred at once to the other entity (this is what stopped the donation I was researching this for). So, for instance, if your donor bought 20 licenses at once and only needs 10, s/he can't just donate the extra 10 to you and keep the ones s/he needs.
- Microsoft do not have Open licensing for the full version of any of their operating systems. They only provide upgrade licensing. If you are being offered upgrade licenses several things need to be true for the transfer to be valid: * You must have valid licensing for a qualifying, older version of the operating system (which may well have come with machine when you bought it) * The original owner can not have previously used the volume licensing s/he is donating to you on any other machines. Even if those machines have now been wiped clean and trashed.
- Similarly, if the licenses to be donated were obtained through software assurance (a sort of automatic right to upgrade to the newest version), the original license for the older product must be donated too (I'm not sure it's possible to purchase software assurance separately from an original license though, so this may be moot).
- You need a good paper trail between the donor and you, with the donor relinquishing all rights to licensing purchased under the authorization number, and you accepting the licenses and MS's terms and conditions. Ideally, you should get copies of the donor's receipts for the software too.
Hope this is helpful. It's just a lay person's understanding after reading up on the issue though. And I found very little in the way of solid information. If you can get pro-bono legal help on this, it would be great to hear a report back!
Helen
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Helen Seal
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