Meeting customer software licensing demands can be seen in terms of two main parameters: product flexibility and business flexibility. Product flexibility refers to the ability to offer customer-specific solutions: a professional SKU for one customer, a basic SKU for another, a demo version, and so on. Business flexibility refers to the ability to offer specific terms for particular clients, including special terms for a very large client, and pay-per-use terms. Microsoft addresses these parameters with a concept it calls SKU agility.

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Here’s a nice and short article I read by Matt Karlyn about software licensing agreements which I found to be useful. It discusses the importants of the agreement and describes what to look out for.
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Here are three solutions that Microsoft has to offer for all of you interested in Software License Protection Services. I recommend reading about Code Protector, SLP Server 2008, and SLP Online Service. These solutions are innovative and refreshing.
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Increasingly customers are seeking tailor made software on demand.  Dynamic Software Packaging through the use of licensing makes it possible for Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) to create specific software solutions for organizations that buy software from them. It is also equally important that the ISV is able to track, monitor and protect the use of their software.

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According to recent industry research, experts estimate that software pirates and hackers steal $35 billion worth of software each year. Securing and managing source code has become vital, a matter of survival for software producers.

Get the Full Software Management Article 

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Software security is fast becoming one of the hottest topics in computer software circles. Today, anyone can easily find a cracked version (software which comes with an illegal software key) by looking in the right places on the internet.

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Approaching software development as a process similar to biologic with stages of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and subsequent decline and death, this full article covers the concept comprehensively.

This approach presuppose that the license should be viewed not as a static (casted in iron) document, but is an dynamic algorithm that perform balancing of the requirements of various user groups on different stages of development by activating different modules on each of such stage. The paper provides a software licensing taxonomy based on rights of major user subgroups  ( author, user, contributors and developers of derivative products) that compose a virtual multidirectional space and that, like for spaceship entering atmosphere, there is a trajectory of the product in this space; some trajectories are better for the survival of the crew.

The author stresses the value of algorithmic simplicity of the license as an important factor of success of the mature free/open software product and software protection

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