by
Brian Madden
This post of part of the "Hey Brian!" series, where Brian answers questions submitted by readers.
Paul Sharp asks, I'm struggling with what's legal and what’s not when it comes to software licensing in the streaming software model. For example, if I have 200 users streaming a software and limit it to only 10 users at a time, do I need to buy 200 licenses or 10? The way I looked at it, you are installing it on the computer while you are using it, but uninstalling when you’re done so the next user can use it. What do you think?
It's too bad that it's taken ten years for the application software vendors to start to understand the concept of using Terminal Services to deploy their applications. Chances are that if you go back to them now and ask about how they license their software for streaming, they'll just look at you funny and say "huh?"
So in this case we're kind of on our own, and it's up to each of us to figure out what the right thing to do is. I like to take the role, "Given what I know about the vendor's licensing model for non-streamed apps, how do I think the vendor would license their app if they totally understood how streaming works?" In other words, it's up to us to interpret the intention of the license agreement, even if the specific letter of the agreement is vague in the context of streaming.
For example, if a vendor licenses their software based on the number of devices on which it's installed, sure, you could argue that technically you don't have it installed on any more 10 devices at a time since you're limiting the number of concurrent usages. But are you doing the right thing in that case? It depends on your situation. If you have 200 users who could access the app, but the same 10 users use it again and again, then I'd say you're okay. But if you have 15 users who regularly rotate in and out and you're only licensed for 10, I'd say that you're actually emulating a concurrent licensing scheme while your vendor intended a device-based scheme. So in that case, I think that would not be right.
This gets even more strange when you try to figure out what a "device" is. Ultimately most vendors call a "device" the actual plastic and metal thing the users interact with to use their application. (This is why you need one license for each user in a Terminal Server scenario, even though the app is only "installed" once.) So even if you're using a single shared master disk image with VDI and then you're streaming apps on-demand at login time, the number of licenses you need in device-based licensing scenarios should be based on the number of different end user devices that a user connects from. Of course you could ask, "What about the user who connects from random devices across the Internet?" One could argue that you'd need to buy a billion device licenses for your app. In this case, device-based licensing is not the right fit, and you can probably circle back with your vendor to discuss your specific use case.
What's really too bad is that most streaming solutions are based on
users, not devices. So if you have software that's licensed per
device, then just the mere fact that you're streaming the app means you'll have to get, umm, "creative" with your implementation. Longer
term, I think we're just going to have to move away from
device-based licensing since the concept of a "device" is really
breaking down. But that's a bigger challenge to the industry-at-large,
so for now the best we can do is try to mimic that to the best of our
abilities and hope that we pass the "straight face" test."
(The "straight face" test is "if you can say it while keeping a
straight face, then it's okay.")
By the way, software that's licensed on a user-basis is a simple. If it's based on concurrent usage, most of the various streaming solutions have the capability to limit concurrent usage out of the box. And for software based on total users (or named users), then again, looking back on the intentions of the vendors, it's probably best to license that for the total number of users who could use that app. (And that's easy enough to do by only making the software available to a specific AD group and then buying the number of licenses that match the number of users in that group.)
So that's my philosophical approach to application licensing in a streamed environment. What does everyone else think?
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