Microsoft takes stand on 'virtual' licensing

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Licensing woes are almost as old as computing

Back in the mainframe days, everything was licensed. Not in today's sense, but in the sense that you paid a certain amount for a certain term, and got maintenance during that term. Then either you kept paying or stopped using it. You couldn't "buy" a software product. But at least if you found a bug, the vendor was obligated to fix it.

Prices were determined, not based solely on how many processors you had, but on the power of the processor. If your mainframe ran at 13 MIPS, you would pay a lot less than somebody whose processor ran at 30 MIPS.

The problem was that if you had a big computer, and you wanted a product that only a dozen people would use, you would pay for hundreds of users, if that's what the processor supported.

Some companies changed to concurrent user licensing, and there needed to be a virtual server that administered connections. Others allowed a certain number of users to be added to the database, and since it was the userid that the user logged on with, it was an easy way to control things. Except that it made little sense to pay for a license for a user who used the product once a year when it cost the same as for one who used it daily.

Then when PCs came along, managers had to deal with another pricing paradigm. And since costs were often decentralized, an individual group within a company might need to deal with only a handful of licenses. Instead of getting a $20,000 email software system, a company could pay $35 per user as needed, and the individual groups could license the software. It may turn out to be more than $20,000, especially when you factor in the overhead of administration, but that was often not measured as a computer expense.

In today's market, we are no closer to a good solution than we were back then. I might need a product a little bit or a lot. I might use it daily or annually. If it's on my computer at home, my whole family might use it, or I might use it personally. And if I have a half dozen computers at home, I might be the only one who uses the application on any of them, but I want it on multiple machines in case one is tied up with a major rendering job or with a child playing a video game on it. So I would not want to license the application on a per server basis. The convenience of not having to move people around from one machine to another would not be worth the price.

In the old days, I wanted to get a copy of a ZIP/UNZIP utility for the mainframe, but it was cost prohibitive. I ended up writing my own client server type system. A user who needed to zip or unzip would run the command. It communicated with a virtual machine that then downloaded the file to a PC in the computer room, where a continuously running process was able to perform the function and then upload the results back to the mainframe. The virtual machine on the mainframe then put the results on the user's disk, and it seemed as if a local process had run. This is exactly the type of thing that Microsoft does not want. But if the total use of any given application is no more than what a single computer running it would need, then that's all I want to pay for.

I could restructure a company so that anybody who wants a particular task done can send it to a specific employee to run it, and that would keep the licensing fees down to a minimum. That's pretty much how things worked in the mainframe days. But the right solution is to make the per seat license affordable so these absurd workarounds are not necessary.

When Microsoft started bundling an entire office suite for under $100, it seemed as if they were doing exactly what was needed. Few anticipated that it was just a way to get their foot in the door so that they could get it back to the point where it's more expensive than mainframes again.

Posted by: wresnick   Posted on: 11/01/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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