Subscription Licensing

I hope supporters of DRM are happy with the way things are going. They should be, if they're a corporation with a patent or copyright that stands to make billions.

It's funny in a not-so-funny sort of way. Companies like Microsoft drove companies like Oracle into the ground for even suggesting such things as this.

How many times over should you pay for software?

Wouldn't it be nice for software developers if they got paid every time someone used their software? Believe it or not, that's how some old-school software developers interpret the notion of software-as-a-service. In their eyes, creating great software is a service for which they should be rewarded, year in, year out, by the hordes of grateful users who benefit from using their software, even when it's SoSaaS.

In the real world, users prefer the notion of the perpetual licence, which works in exactly the same way as when a consumer buys a book, a CD or a DVD. You pay a one-time fee, and you can replay the contents for your own private use as often as you like. Of course, music publishers are starting to devise fiendish tricks to thwart that basic principle. The first step was discovering that consumers can be persuaded to adopt a new playback medium every few years or so, necessitating the repurchase of their entire back catalog on the new format. As David Berlind has been explaining in several recent blog posts, the latest wheeze is the use of digital restrictions management (DRM) technology to erect artificial barriers between different format generations (or even contemporaneous implementations by different vendors). Heaven forbid that home networking should thwart the music and movie industries' strategy of forcing consumers to rebuy exactly the same content with the emergence of each new format generation.

But the software industry is greedy enough to want to go even further. Ignoring the subtleties of DRM — which snares users by glossing over the unseen ties between content and format — vendors from BEA to Microsoft are eager to take up the blunt cudgel of subscription licensing, which merely asserts that, if you don't pay up again at the end of the year, your software stops working. The best way to deploy the mechanism of subscription licensing, of course, is as a hosted service, because it gives the software vendor the ability to instantly turn off the software-on-tap if the renewal is not forthcoming. Perhaps this explains Microsoft's new-found attraction to 'hosted everything' (whether or not it can work).

A more sophisticated ploy was recently suggested by Murugan Pal, CTO and founder of Kim Polese's packaged open-source stack vendor SpikeSource. In an O'Reilly blog posting, he argued that the term 'software as a service' shouldn't be applied to on-demand vendors like salesforce.com because they offer application functionality rather than software per se (which is true enough). Instead, he went on to argue, the term should apply to vendors who provide and manage software that's downloaded onto user machines:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/index.php?p=53

You don't always have to pay for what you need. :-)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1647116,00.asp


The "big guns" of the software industry are going to price themselves right out of business! Corporations may be willing to pay yearly licensing fees, but consumers (many of whom have multiple computers in the family) will look for alternatives from smaller companies and open source.

This sort of thing may well push acceptance of alternative operating systems such as GNU/Linux, but if you read the article you'll note that certain elements of the open source community are backing this scheme as well as a method of generating revenue. It'll still be "open source" but to use it you'll have to connect to a remote server.

In a very raw form, this is already taking place with projects like the formerly named WineX. (I forget its current name.) The software is essentially free, but you have to have a subscription to their service to download updates, and since it is a project that is constantly evolving as new games, video cards, and other related hardware come out, you need the updates for it to do you any good with anything other than what you have at any given moment. I don't really have a problem with that particular incarnation of the idea since once installed you can tweak it yourself if you have the ability, and it never stops working for everything it is already developed to do, but it is the first step in the direction of requiring continued subscription fees to use anything.

The most immediate problem, in my view, will be the implementation of operating systems via subscription. You never install anything on your computer but some sort of loader program that requires an internet connection, most likely a high speed one, that connects to a remote server and "boots" your computer. From that point, everything you do is controlled in one way or another by the company that owns that server, and the licensing can even forbid you to use alternative software packages to those offered by that company. Imagine paying a monthly bill for your phone service, internet service, and computer service.

It's easy to pass it off as unlikely, and I would like to do that just as I did with Oracle, but MS and other companies seeking to do this have billions of dollars and a strangelhold on the market. They can do pretty much whatever they want to do.

For now anyway, I'm glad I've weened myself as much as possible off Windoze.