The heartbreak of software licensing

For the most part, I don't deal with software licensing. I like it this way. WWU has one person who has dealing with software licensing as a core part of her job. She does a great job at it! And like a tax-accountant, the fact that this is what she does day in and day out means that I rarely end up applying head to appropriate walls over licensing.

Licensing is a hard, hard problem, especially when you throw in that heady mix of virtualization and discounts into the mix. The software industry as a whole is still figuring out how to license stuff in a virtual environment, and we work in an industry that typically gets discounts above and beyond what others get. Add in a healthy dash of smaller software vendors that have simpler licensing regimes, and you have enough for a full time job.

Our particular place in the software ecosystem is defined by these characteristics:

  • Higher Education
  • State Government (we are a public university that received state support)
  • ~4,200 staff
  • ~14,000 full-time-equivalent students
  • ~23,000 users (+/- 1500 depending on our exact percentage of part-timer students and where we are in the year)
  • ~1,800 computer-lab seats
  • ~3,000 computers
Any given software licensing regime will take one or more of the above. Most will take 'Higher Ed' into account into their licensing, which we appreciate since it makes it cheaper. Being State means we can leverage master-contracts negotiated by the State, but frequently the higher-ed discount makes independent contracts cheaper than going through Olympia.

Then comes the rest of it.

For stuff that everyone gets, like anti-virus software, the per-seat charge is where we pay the closest attention. The last time the AV contract went out for bid, the entity that won did so in large part because they applied their per-seat charge against the staff count (4,200), where the others applied it to the FTE-student + Staff number (18,200); even with a higher per-seat charge that still came in markedly cheaper.

For stuff that goes on every lab-seat, we have a mix of software that has to be licensed for every seat (1800) or a concurrency arrangement that requires a license server. We like the concurrency arrangement, but it means we need a license server.

Which brings me to license servers. We do have a FlexLM license-server, but not everything uses FlexLM. Also, FlexLM version support may end up forcing us to have more than one licensing server (which incurs OS licensing costs). It's working, but a trial.



That's end-user software licensing, but IT-software can be worse. We solved our Microsoft problem by caving and getting a Select agreement. While our client-access-licenses are covered, we still need to purchase Server licenses. Rolling out Exchange 2010 required picking up OS and Exchange server licenses, but we didn't have to worry about umpteen thousand CALs for our end-users. Simple, in its way. However, knowing, or know how to find out, what exact products are covered by our Select agreement is part of why our licensing person does this full time.

I have yet to meet the system administrator of any experience who hasn't had to shake their fist at ala-carte pricing for IT software. We ended up changing our backup vendor over a gross misunderstanding of the differences in licensing models between our old vender and the prospective new one. The new one wasn't any cheaper, the biggest benefit there is that we had to buy new licenses a lot less often than we had to with the old vendor.

IT software pricing competence is the biggest value-add that Value Added Resellers give, at least for us (see also, Higher Ed discounts). We don't do enough volume with IT software for our in-house software person to gain any real experience with it, so we have to trust outsiders. We trust them to know WTF they're talking about when it comes to reselling IT software. Which means that when they fail us, we get very angry. The backup software debacle ended up costing us about 120% more than we expected to pay once we got truly fully licensed for what we wanted to do, and getting to that step took nearly two years before we got it all ironed out. Since then, however, they've caught things we never even knew existed.

Like tax accountants handling very complex returns, getting a definitive answer for what is exactly the amount of licensing needed varies with who you ask. You'd think the rules would be nicely deterministic, but that presupposes complete knowledge of the whole system and uniform understanding of definitions. In the past when attempting to get an idea as to what licensing was required for a specific thing I'm thinking about we've gotten different answers from different people at the vendor itself, as well as a couple of VARs. Four people, four answers, two of whom actually work for who we were trying to buy from, fairly large price spread (though the higher-ed discount percentage was uniform across all of them).

Who do you trust? Whichever one sounds reasonable, and hope. If you get in trouble with a vendor, at least you have someone complicit in your unintended perfidity. In the case of the backup software we learned the hard way that how the software enforces licenses was different from how the VAR understood licensing to work (imperfect understanding of definitions). They did help make things right, but the sheer magnitude of the definition misunderstanding still made it very expensive.



For entities smaller than us, licensing is just as much of a head-ache, especially for end-user software. They may not have a Select agreement so may be purchasing off of the Microsoft/Adobe/Apple rolling cart. Virtual desktops, which we've avoided so far, make that hard to pin down since the definition of 'machine' is variable. I'm not in that space, but I hear things. It's hard.

It's hard everywhere.

I would not be at all surprised if someone could found a business on advising companies on software licensing issues.