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The ISO/IEC 19770-3 Standard Makes Software Licensing Compliance Easy

By David Gitonga, TMCnet Contributing Writer

The ISO/IEC (News - Alert) 19770-3 Software License Compliance Standard has been under development for the last few years, according to a recent blog post by Flexera Software.  Its scope is quite large and includes an entitlement for a customer recording mechanism in standard format, a channel process for moving information from publishers to customers, the ability for customers to create up to three tags when necessary that includes licensing validation and enough information for customers to understand their rights and limitations.

Due to changing software licensing models and the need for customers to understand all their rights in a market that includes SaaS (News - Alert) services, perpetual and term licensing as well as maintenance and support, the standard has also redefined the definition of “license” and now describes “rights to access” and “rights to use.” Customers are expected to understand all these details to determine compliance position. To validate compliance, the standard has included test values, scripts, URL and other “test methods” for a variety of licensing models so that customers can test compliance.

In order to help customers stay compliant, it was deemed necessary to standardize how limits are expressed. The standard tries to capture limits for each entitlement using various variables like environment limits, language limits and customer type limits among others. Publishers can also provide additional information that better inform the customer. This can include purchase information, contract information, activation information and rules for true-up among others.  

To account for lifecycle changes, concepts such as revoke, archive, upgrade as well as deployment concepts like Open Source and OEMs among others have also been included. Entitlement information under certain circumstances such as partial upgrades, true-up and add-on purchases among others has also been included to provide guidance.

The ISO/IEC 19770-3 standard will co-habit with the ISO/IEC 19770-2standard for software identification and help answer customer comparison queries such as “what have I installed?” compared to “what do I have a right to install?”