Limiting logons to licensed number: how?

[John Mashey]

KEITH F. PILOTTI  {decvax,ucbvax}!sdcsvax!telesoft!pilotti writes:
>     Hmmm, I might be spoiled by public domain software, but my gut feeling
>     isn't too good on this.  First it was PER-CPU licensing, now it's
>     PER-USER ?  What's next, PER-PROCESS ??  PER-CYCLE ???  (Imagine: ....
> 
>     Maybe I'm economically naive, but I think this is ridiculous.  When I buy
>     something, I feel I should be able to do whatever I darn well please with
>     it.  I'd rather not have some Big-Brother tell me I can only toast bread
>     Monday-Friday unless I pay more for the toaster. 
>
>     Thinking of other commodities in life, the precedent of charging more
>     money for greater use seems to be justified and expected only for things
>     which are consumable.  I don't see that to be the case with hardware or
>     operating systems....

1) There is a long history of IBM and others charging for software on the
basis of the system size, even with the same software running.  There is also
IBM history of paying more for running the same machine 3 shifts instead of 2.
All of this is usually called "value pricing".

2) Remember how ATT got here: an important reason for all of this was to
REDUCE the binary charge for the smaller systems, because people wouldn't
pay VAX-size prices for 68K-size machines.  Of course, there are always
corporate goals of total revenue.

3) All of this is a tricky issue; I'd rather have per-user pricing, so that
I can both have cheap software on cheap machines, and reasonable per-user
costs on big machines, than have cut either end off.  If you look the
numbers, what they seem to be doing is to try to get a consistent
per-user cost for software [with some aberrations here and there].
-- 
-john mashey
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