Software Deployment

Hmm thats a interesting question.
In the most eula / licence agrements i seen the line that nothing of the software has to be reverse engineerd of disabled or harmed in other ways but i never heard a case that someone has legal problems because the person had (re)packaged the software. For reasons i can agree i can image that vendors doesn't support msi that is custom build. What i do in pratical way is when i have problems with a application repackaged by myself first i try to reproduce the problems with a "vanilly ice" setup on a bare windows xp installation. when the same problems ocur then can contacting a vendor a option.

As far as I am aware it may very well invalidate any vendor support, if they are being arses about it!

P

If you can reproduce the problem with a manual setup then they can not denied the support. (so far my experience in netherlands do not know how it works in other country's )

ORIGINAL: Inabus

As far as I am aware it may very well invalidate any vendor support, if they are being arses about it!

P

I cannot imagine any vendor with a brain and who cherishes their client relationships would have a EULA on their set-up mechanism. There are those who crack on about no support for installs which don't use that mechanism but you can reassure yourself that your MSI reproduces the vendor's install by always, ALWAYS snapshotting a run of the vendor's install over the top of your package. That way, you can be sure you haven't missed anything or accidentally deleted anything relevant.

Think the rule of thumb is as Cybermage says - you would need to replicate problem and use a manual install to get support.

Ive had this very scenario. Snapshotted a vendor product and found an issue. The vendor actually new about the issue, apparently happens when you use WPS to snapshot the app. Anyway, the vendor made it clear they dont support the snapshotted MSI, but they do support the product etc. Im sure most would if they want customers to buy and use thier product.

(the issue with the snapshot was the way an ini file was written. WPS tends to jumble up ini file entries, the product had to have the ini entries in a certain order for it to work properly. So adding the ini as a file was the fix, silly application)

The product, support, maybe if it's install related. The license agreement I wouldn't think so, unless repackaging somehow violates it.

There is no reason why a company would support their products if you bypasse their "setup intelligence".

When you click on "setup", the setup will check your configuration: OS, computer type, computer model, Service pack, prerequisite on computer. When you snapshot, you are completely bypassing this intelligence to make your own. Sometimes it will be good but sometimes not.

If you are a packager, would you support someone who install a software with setup.exe instead you MSI? Would you support someone who had install a software in a complete different way than yours? Probably not and it would make you angry too. So why would they want them to support you? They just cannot. They will not get a look to your MSI and most of the time, the technician will not know what you did.