So, what license should I have for my company or institution?
As promised on my last post of a couple of days ago, there are a few things pending, mainly:
- ESOR 2009 trip report (Haifa, Israel)
- SMASH 2009 trip report (Chamonix, France)
- More on the current MS market status for software and the arguments for a tool such as Mnova MS.
All this is coming very soon, but, after seeing this specific question a number of times over the last few days, I wanted to blog about it to make things clearer for our users/potential users out there.
The ideal license model for you will depend on 2 things:
- How many people will be using the software at your institution or company
- How intensively it will be used
You have 2 options based on license model (I am ignoring nominated licenses here as this post is concerned with licenses for a whole company or institution and not for individuals/small groups):
- Campus or Site License
- Concurrent License
Campus or Site License
The way this works is that you have a maximum number of installations (50/100/150/unlimited).
We provide you with a license server program, which you install, and a license file for the license server (you can check out the instructions for this here). You can then distribute this license file to as many users as you want. What then happens is, these users use the license file to activate the software. Each time a user activates the software, they count as an active user, whether they are using the software or not. When you get to the limit of, for example, 150 people who activated the software, nobody else can activate it.
Concurrent License
These are also known as floating licenses or seats. What you buy is a number of seats for simultaneous usage.
This works as follows: we give you a license server and license file exactly the same as before. An UNLIMITED number of users can activate the software, but only a given number can use it simultaneously. For example, imagine you bought 5 seats - you can have 400 people activated but, at any given time, only 5 can use it. If an additional user tries to use it at that time, they get a message saying the licenses are taken up and they have to try later. (One important aspect to consider is that the lack of limitations for installation is a particularity of Mestrelab, concurrent licenses from other vendors may limit BOTH the number of installations and the simultaneous usage)
- Advantages: This is a cheap alternative if you have a very high number of installations with people who hardly ever use the software
- Disadvantages: If people use the software quite intensively, they will soon take up the available licenses and this results in disruption for other users, who cannot access it when they need it. The other disadvantage is that people have to be connected to the network to be able to use the software, as they need the license server to release a license to them. (This is not entirely true, a seat could be booked to an user if requested from the license server administrator and granted, but of course, this will tie that seat up for the whole period that user has requested).
Our advice.
So, which license you need depends on the 2 parameters I included at the beginning. For academia, we don’t find concurrent licenses work well, as too many people use the software too much and the prices are very much biased towards making the software available to everyone/everywhere/everytime (for the price of approximately 10 seats you can buy an unlimited campus license, and for a 150 user license you can buy around 7 seats - the chances in a community like yours are that more than 7 people will need to use the software at the same time on a regular basis). In industry, this is not so cut and dry.
You can find the prices of all these license packages at our store.
You can read more on the types of licenses here:
- What are campus licenses and why should I have them?
- Should I have concurrent or nominated licenses?
Of course, should you have any questions or love the license model so much you have to buy a license, just write to us at sales@mestrelab.com.
