rwp@hogpc.UUCP (R.PAUL) (04/20/84)
[Hello, Mom.] If a software license protection mechanism is employed that ties a piece of software to a given piece of hardware (by embedding the hardware serial number in the code or whatever), there exists a fairly straightforward and fair way to determine software prices in a LAN environment. Since remote execution would be the only way of being able to use the program from a machine other than that for which the program is licensed, programs could be priced according to the maximum number of concurrent users (or processes) that could run on the hardware. In this way, the customer is limited by the hardware the software runs on. Once the machine is being fully utilized, it would be necessary to buy another copy of the program for another machine to allow more users to use the program. Of course, in the file server model given in the article that brought up this problem, where the software would not be tied to a particular machine (other than perhaps by a contract), this pricing method would not work. However, it should be noted that most networks will not be made up of homogeneous machines, so the remote execution model seems to be the more desirable model. There still remain questions as to how a number of concurrent users or processes (or whatever measure is liked better by a given software vendor) would be arrived at, but the situation probably wouldn't be much worse than the present one. Rick Paul AT&T Information Systems Labs Lincroft, New Jersey ihnp4!hogpc!rwp