Has anyone checked the authenticity of Wolfram's claims of illegal copies of Mathematica being used here? Might they be (or have been) counting personally procured copies (e.g. the Home Edition) on, say, peoples' laptops when run here?
We have checked as well as we can – Wolfram provided us with a list of IP addresses, license numbers and MathIDs. We tracked down most of those users and did not find anyone
where Wolfram had alleged illegal use that actually had a valid license. (There were a number where we couldn't check – eg academic visitors, conference delegates, people who had left)
Their initial allegation was worded something like "4000 illegal copies" - this actually meant 4000 usage instances (so anything from a single use by a student "trying it
out" to a member of staff using it > 100 times over more than a year)
What happens if I were physically at home, but logged onto the college's VPN (which I do a lot to, e.g., send emails via icex, log onto HPC, remote desktop my workstation, ssh my workstation, access my college home directory (I think), etc.)
and then launch a personal copy of Mathematica? Would this start a red light flashing at Wolfram's lawyers HQ?
No. Wolfram track the pair of MathID and License number – provided they are valid they don't seem to care where you are using it (so we know we have had visitors using perfectly
legal copies of Mathematica at Imperial and these are not picked up by Wolfram as illegal – they're not)
Is it just Imperial that has been targeted by Wolfram, or have other universities been lent on too?
I don't know but I suspect that we were targeted because we used to have a site license and then cancelled it. I think there were perfectly valid reasons for this (eg
Maths used to use it for teaching but moved to Maple meaning that a site license was no longer needed). I would guess that if any other university had a site license and cancelled it then they would also be checked out.
Steve