By John Emmitt
Rumors have been swirling for weeks and now the news is out—all of the major software vendors have decided to eliminate software licensing. This will allow their customers to just buy the software and use it in any way they choose, for as long as they like. This, of course, also means the end of software audits and unbudgeted audit true-up expenses—no licensing terms and conditions—no software license compliance issues. What a relief! We have heard of one organization that is in the fourth year of the same software license audit. One can only hope that the vendors will simply drop all audits that are already in progress as part of this new paradigm.
The spokesperson for one vendor was quoted as saying: “Software licensing had just gotten to the point where it was so complex that even we didn’t understand our own licensing terms and conditions. I mean, who knows what ‘roaming use rights inside the firewall’ means? It sounds like an oxymoron or something. So we decided the best course of action was to eliminate licensing altogether. It’s going to make not only our life but our customers’ lives so much easier.”
When asked about things like product upgrade rights, the spokesperson said that of course the company wants to get paid for new versions of the software—it’s the only way they can stay in business after all. But that it would be up to the customer’s discretion if they wanted to pay for the new version, assuming they had already paid for a previous release of the software. This really puts the pressure on the software vendors to continue to produce software products that their customers want to use, and are willing to pay for.
This is a wakeup call for software asset management and license optimization tool vendors (see this Gartner Report: Software License Optimization Vendor Overview)—there’s not much need for sophisticated tools that understand and apply software product use rights (see this recent blog on the topic). No need to minimize license consumption by taking advantage of right of second use, disaster recovery/failover rights and virtual use rights. Now you can spin up as many virtual machines as you like and run the software on all of them. Without worrying about license mobility rights, you can move your on-premise software to the cloud if you want to. It’s a crazy world we live in.
Wait, this just in… Someone just informed me that today is April 1st, 2013… Happy April Fool’s Day everyone!