

Cloud Computing's Other Achilles' Heel: Software Licensing - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/01/27/cloud-computings-other-achilles-heel-software-licensing.aspx

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jwilliams
This is absolutely true - currently enterprise licensing is often (almost
always) braindead.

I've often been forced to put in a new J2EE cluster (for example), because
licenses are CPU based -- if the license is expensive it doesn't add up to run
at 10% utility on a large, shared cluster. To get bang-for-license-buck you're
forced to run on only dedicated hardware.

Really annoying because it destroys economies of scale - you have all this
bity infrastructure. Not only is this a pain to maintain, but it also means
that you generally end up with more infrastructure, and use more energy, can't
virtualize, etc, etc.

~~~
gaius
By no means a new problem. At my last company, one project I was tangentially
involved with had a 5-node VCS cluster comprised of quad-processor machines
running a wide variety of apps, one of which was Oracle. Oracle could
obviously only be running on one node at a time on a maximum of 4
processors... Oracle wanted paying for 20 licenses anyway.

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modoc
Software providers need to move off of core-based licensing both due to how
CPU evolution is going wider (multi-core) faster than it's going deep (GHz),
and due to the cloud computing aspect.

A small post I made on the topic:

[http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/java/atg/rant-
abou...](http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/java/atg/rant-about-core-
based-licensing.html)

