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Multi-core, software licensing and utility computing

by Charlie Bess

There has been a great deal of discussion lately in the press as well as blogs about software licensing and multi-core. With products like Azul's and multi-core activities like Sun's Niagra, we've yet to see the tip-of-the-iceberg.

It's clear that all the discussion about utility computing has quite a long way to go from the software licensing perspective.

Some of the big questions are:

Will the utility computing vendors be viewed as value added resellers?
How will business continuity be handled from a licensing perspective?
What exactly can the compute cycles that the software is licensed on be used for?

These were a few of the areas that cause ASP to stumble in the 90s. It looks like multi-core is causing the industry to reflect on it again, before utility computing will make everyone take a good hard look, because the current model definitely breaks down.

Published Monday, August 01, 2005 9:05 PM

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Comments

Posted by Bruce McPhee Monday, August 08, 2005 12:55 PM

How do shared software components, or services within a SOA, Web Services, etc get licensed... The whole concept of reusability is great for developing, but what happens when we want to sell it to someone? Or have someone else use it?

We I am working at, we are just starting to have the development vendors provide modular/shared component base tools. COTS suppliers are also coming on board with that concept. So, what happens, if vendor A produces a real neat component, which is a part of their application, but now I want vendor B to create a new custom tool for me and I want to use a component from vendor A, but nothing else from their application... Will vendor A allow vendor B to use that component, and how will they license it... or due to it being custom code for the client who already licensed application A, there are no licensing issues? Add a couple more vendors and a couple more components and you can see how this can get very sticky...

Posted by Charles Bess Friday, December 02, 2005 4:24 PM

Here is a better link about Niagara (it would help if I spelled it right).
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19423

Posted by License Manager Monday, May 08, 2006 8:13 PM

Yeah I agree with you that it's a complex topic. In a not so distant future we will eventually see something like 100 cores per cpu. At least discussions about such things has been going on for a while. I personally would find it awkward for a single cpu machine to take more then one license. However in some cases it makes sense though if you're doing something which is very cpu intensive. A big thing also depends on the actual market which you operate in. E.g. will customers accept increased costs for doing the same thing as usually? Some CPU vendors like AMD are also working in the opposite direction of sharing two cpu's for doing jobs which were originally ment for one cpu. In other words the scenario gets rathered blured. If you're looking for a flexible license management solution you could eventually look into LM-X from X-Formation http://www.x-formation.com It will give you the option to decide yourself.