

It's time for seat-based software licensing to end - techdog
http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1550-End-Software-Seat-Licensing?source=twitter

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tptacek
Seat-based licensing allows enterprise software companies to value-price; they
can sell to a 50 person law firm for a low amount, without giving away the
store to a 5000 person enterprise. The alternatives are to forgo the smaller
companies and market exclusively to BigCo's, or to leave huge amounts of money
on the table.

This person's problem isn't with seat-based licensing. It's with license
enforcement. No license enforcement scheme is good. They all suck, no matter
how simple the pricing model.

A reasonable response to this complaint is, maintain seat-based pricing, but
don't do "hard" enforcement; just alert the product admin that they need to
update their licensing, and make it extremely easy for them to do that. Have a
maintenance and support process that checkpoints licensing compliance, so that
customers can run the product indefinitely without complying, but will be
forced to confront licensing when they call for support or try to upgrade the
software.

