By Dan Kusnetzky published: Monday, November 26 2007
Software licensing used to be a relatively simple game. Depending upon the type of software, suppliers licensed their software by the system, by the user or by the site.
Licensing by the system
If a supplier chose to license their software to each physical system, a company had to pay a license fee for each physical system that would run the software. As systems got more powerful, suppliers added a new wrinkle to their licensing strategies. They started offering their software using a tiered licensing strategy. Systems having similar processing power were grouped together in tiers and a separate price was levied for each tier. As multi-processing systems emerged, it was a simple matter to add them to the tiered licensing structure.
Licensing by the user
If a supplier chose to license their software by the user, they either limited the number of users that could use the software and charged a separate fee to add users or asked companies to purchase user or client access licenses. Companies had to purchase a license for each person who would use the software. This approach could be a little simpler to administer. It made little difference if company wanted to use a single, very powerful server or many smaller servers, the license fee for a specific number of users was always the same.
Novell has been using this type of license for a number of years. The catch here is that some sort of identity service has to be active on the network to allow user metering to function properly. Another catch is that what happens to batch or network-oriented jobs that can't be directly associated with any single user might not be clearly spelled out in the license.
Licensing by the site
Even if a supplier typically licensed their software by the system or by the user, they usually also offered site licenses or organizational licenses for their software. The company would pay a single (usually very large) fee for the software and then could install it on as many server or clients as needed without having to account for users or systems.
Virtual resources complicates everything
Several layers of virtualization technology abstract applications from the underlying hardware platform. This challenges hardware-based licensing schemes. That is a piece of software is licensed to be used on a specific system. Installing or moving it to any other system requires a second license even if only one copy of the software is active at any given time. Until very recently, Microsoft licensed its operating systems to a single machine. This type of license is based upon an assumption that is no longer really true, that is that software stays on a single machine once it is installed.
Many of Microsoft's supported software products, such as SQLserver or Exchange are still licensed this way. Imagine the cost of maintaining separate licenses for the organizations data management software, application frameworks, and applications on each and every server in its network even though the software may be active only for moments in any given year.
Virtualization has challenged most licensing schemes. Applications or their underlying components might move from machine to machine to optimize performance as the workload changes. An entire stack of software, everything from data management software all the way up the stack to application access software could move from one machine to another to improve performance or handle a failure of some type.
The key licensing question for this decade is what licensing architecture will be considered equitable to both suppliers and consumers of software when key components of that software could reside on many machines in the network and be activated upon need and deactivated the rest of the time? What licensing scheme is fair to everyone when a virtual machine containing a whole application is moved around the network to balance the workload to the available computing power? What happens when key application components are replicated in a cluster to enhance performance or scalability for a few moments in a month?
What do you think is fair?
Daniel Kusnetzky has over 30 years of industry experience. He is responsible for research and analysis on open source software, virtualization software and system software. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues and end-user integration requirements. In the past he was executive vice president for Open-Xchange, Inc., and Program Vice President of System Software Research for International Data Corporation.
The Kusnetzky Group is an independent supplier of marketing services to suppliers end user organizations and suppliers in the systems, virtualization and open source technology markets. Intel and several suppliers of virtualization technology are among those companies. The opinions presented in this document are based upon our research, our personal experiences and actual use of technology regardless of whether this document or the supporting research were sponsored by one or more of the Kusnetzky Group’s clients. This document may not be copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the Kusnetzky Group.
