Generating software agreements for your own products
To present license terms before you install a non-IBM software product, you generate a software agreement and then associate it with your packaged product. To do this, you use either Management Central or i5/OS® software product APIs. Users then accept the software agreement to continue with the installation of the software product.
Independent software providers can create online software license agreements. A user is then required to accept the software agreement to complete the installation.
To create a software agreement, you begin by creating the directory for your documents in the /QIBM/UserData/LicenseDoc directory. Choose a name that is unique from any other agreement from any other vendor. Consider using your product identifier, version, release, modification, and option as part of the name. For example, you could use the Work with Object Links (WRKLNK) command and create the MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1 directory.
You then create one or more language versions of the software agreement in this directory. A document's name begins with the directory name and has a language suffix appended. For example, MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1_en for an English version of the agreement, and MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1_ja for a Japanese version.
The software agreement documents need to be created in UCS-2 Unicode, specifically UTF-16. The Unicode coded character set identifier (CCSID) is 13488. To create the documents, you can use the edit function under the WRKLNK command, as well as variety of PC tools. If you use a tool that generates UTF-16, it needs to be BigEndian.
To use the WRKLNK command to create a software agreement document in the MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1 directory, do the following:
- Select Option 2 (Edit) against your MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1 directory.
- Under the new file prompt, type MyProdIDVRMOptDoc1_en for the file name and press Enter to edit.
- Before entering text, select F15 (Services).
- Select option 3 and change the CCSID to 13488. Press Enter.
- Select option 5 and change the stream file EOL option to *CRLF.
- Press F3 to edit your agreement. Make sure that no characters go past column 76 (either single wide or double wide).
- Press F2 to save and then press PF3 to exit.
Details on how to format the agreement, the naming requirements, and languages supported are described in the Create Product Load (QSZCRTPL) API.
Parent topic:
Building and managing your own software products