For years we've been hearing stories from readers who encounter a puzzling phenomena concerning McAfee licensing. McAfee sales reps have this mysterious tendency to discover that the customer's paid-up licenses have disappeared.
"What the heck is going on with McAfee licensing?" a reader wrote recently. "I bought a perpetual license to Total Virus Defense Suite two years ago. The perpetual license is supposed to cover me indefinitely -- that's what perpetual means. The only thing required is an annual support fee to enable the continued downloading of updates and upgrades."
But now that McAfee has now changed the name of the suite to Active Virus Defense, the reader was informed by a McAfee sales rep that he must license all the products anew. "All McAfee did was change the name of the suite - the products that make up the new suite are the same ones I am already using," the reader wrote. "But he said that my perpetual license only covered me 'for the life of the product.' What I couldn't get him to understand is that the products themselves are still the same ones, so I should only have to pay to renew my support contract. Unfortunately, the somewhat less than intelligent folks who answer the phones at McAfee don't seem to understand their own licensing."
A perpetual license that only lasts until the software company changes the name of the product certainly doesn't seem very perpetual. "This whole situation is ridiculous," the reader wrote. "What is the point of buying a perpetual license if it expires? Why should I pay for a new license for the exact same products I am already using?"
The reader decided the only thing to do was to find a better source of information about McAfee licensing than McAfee. "I called CDW and they had their licensing specialist look into it," the reader wrote. "They said that my existing McAfee perpetual license is still good, and all I need to do is renew my support contract. What is ridiculous about the whole thing is that you can't get correct information from the sales reps at McAfee. This is true for other vendors as well. The people who are supposed to have the answers usually don't. I get tired of having to waste time on the phone trying to figure out the latest licensing nonsense. If I hadn't, however, I would have ended up paying for licenses I did not need."
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