Featured Article from Software Licensing

Software is an interesting industry. It doesn’t seem like that long ago we were firmly in the college years; trying to get by on the tools we had at our disposal. One of those tools was Microsoft (News - Alert) Office and most of us didn’t have the funds to support a license of our own. What did we do? We downloaded a friend’s version onto our computers and we were off and running. It was the best way we knew to get around software licensing. And, given we were just students – there’s no way it could be wrong.

Fast forward more years than I like to admit and the software licensing world is a tad more complex. We not only see the importance of licensing and what it means for protecting information and jobs, we also understand the safeguards companies like Microsoft has put in place to protect its investments. While some may view it as the giant enterprise taking advantage of the little guy, the reality is it’s a company that deserves to be paid for its product.

The same is true for any producer, regardless of the industry in which they operate. But the world of software has changed. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, no longer offers the Office suite as a CD you can purchase, try and share among friends. Now, we all need to download our own version from the cloud. And if you’re trying to leverage the ownership of a friend, think again. The company has safeguarded against that as well.

The idea is to provide additional options that keep pace with the demands of the market. But not everything is trending that quickly, causing problems for software developers. A recent Flexera Software blog highlights the challenge. While software licensing models have evolved throughout the years to provide producers more options when it comes to what and how to price products to better align with how customers buy software, the vast majority of licenses are still linked to the hardware media access control (MAC) address of the network adapter stored in the BIOS of the physical device.

When this happens, it poses a challenge: software producers must either continue to rely on the physical device identifier as the critical link to the software license or find another solution so as to survive in the digital era. This process of software decoupling from hardware is essential to enable software to work in both physical and virtual environments, as well as enable a migration between the two.

To address this issue, producers need to consider a usage-based or cloud-based licensing server to enable the decoupling of licenses from the physical device. In doing so, producers better position themselves in a digital world; protecting their investments to derive revenue in a competitive market.