Understanding Campus-Wide Software Licensing

You may wonder how software licenses are administered on campus and whether or not there are discounts available for software that you have considered purchasing. Software vendors often do give discounts to faculty, staff and students of the University, though with growing frequency, those discounts are little different from the real "street price."

Some vendors extend their educational discounts directly, while other vendors develop complex arrangements that require the administration of a "licensing" agreement. This article will help you to find discounted software and discuss three factors that now make software licensing extremely difficult to administer:

Licensing agreements vary from vendor to vendor--in fact, each one is different. Even a single vendor may have various licensing agreements for each product, release, version, and platform.
Licensing agreements are often complex.
Software vendors are increasing the prices for their products.

WHERE TO FIND DISCOUNTED SOFTWARE

Software discounts are available through five channels:

UW Purchasing--Some vendors offer volume discounts on software through UW purchasing.
The University Book Store and other retailers--Microsoft and other vendors offer software products to individuals and departments.
Vendors themselves.
Departments--Individual departments frequently purchase software products and manage the licensing agreements.
The C&C campus-wide software licensing office offers a limited array of software licenses in accordance with University policy. In general, C&C deals with a selected subset of licenses for system-level software (e.g., TCP/IP, operating systems, and the like) that are supported by C&C.
In addition, C&C pro vides licenses and support for statistical packages that have a wide use across many disciplines and which are also furnished on C&C servers. For more information about the soft ware offered by C&C campus-wide licensing, send email to cw-soft@cac.washington.edu or call 543-3650. We hope to have this information available soon in UWIN.

VARIOUS LICENSING AGREEMENTS

Many people assume that software licensing agreements consist of true site licenses where, for an annual fee, an unlimited number of users can copy the product. Such agreements were rare in the past and are almost non-existent today. Currently, most software licensing agreements consist of either rentals or volume purchases.

The least desirable situation is one in which the software license is only a rental agreement. For example, C&C pays an annual fee for SPSS for DOS, Windows, and Macintosh computers. However, if this fee is not paid, the University community relinquishes the right to continue using SPSS, including all previous versions. In fact, the vendor requires that C&C return all disks and that users destroy all copies of the software and confirm it in writing. With people constantly entering and leaving the UW community, this presents an administrative nightmare.

Many other software agreements consist of volume purchases where a discount is extended to the University when a group of orders is submitted to the vendor at one time. On the surface, this procedure seems straightforward, but many agreements come with a twist. For example:

The University must purchase a certain dollar amount from Novell to become eligible for a discount on their Netware. Since Netware is sold in packs of various sizes (10, 20, or 100 licenses, etc.) users are often forced to purchase more licenses than they need.
Last year Novell told users who wanted to get upgrades of Netware that the cheapest route would be to subscribe to their "update program" rather than to buy the new version when it was released. Under this program users paid annual fees to Novell: $1000 for each 100-user and $500 for each 20-user Netware 386 license, and $140 for Netware for Macintosh computers. Although Netware 4.0 was scheduled to be released last fall, it was not released at all, and customers paid update fees for nothing.

COMPLEX LICENSING SCHEMES

Many software vendors develop schemes that make it difficult and costly to administer a software licensing agreement. One example of a paper-oriented, labor intensive, and complex software distribution scheme is Sun's ScholarPAC. This package includes the Sun operating system and about 20 other products. C&C pays an annual fee for the right to distribute the ScholarPAC to about 300 users.

In the past, these products were distributed in a way that allowed users to retrieve the software over the network so that they could begin installing and using it immediately. Although users can still obtain the software via file transfer over the network, they cannot use it. This is because Sun recently introduced a new licensing scheme that requires paper "right to use" certificates for each version of each product in the ScholarPAC.

Under the new licensing scheme, users first must contact Sun to request a certificate for each product they want to use. Each certificate has an authorization number printed on it. Sun then sends the certificates to C&C campus-wide licensing to distribute to users. This process is problematic because Sun does not include the user's name with the certificate. When the user finally receives the certificate, he or she must call Sun to request a password in order to use the software. This process has been made even more difficult by the fact that it can take up to one month to receive product certificates from Sun, and Sun staff members have occasionally been unfamiliar with their own system when they were contacted by users requesting a password.

INCREASING SOFTWARE COSTS

As the price of computer hardware has dropped, software costs have often increased considerably. A graphic example of increasing costs is DEC's licensing arrangement called the Campuswide Software License Grant (CSLG) program. This program includes about 600 products for various DEC platforms that were provided free of charge. C&C purchased media and technical support for a subset of the licensed products. Use of these 600 software products was basically unlimited.

However, the program has been difficult to administer over the past year due to DEC's introduction of a product authorization key (PAK) licensing scheme. Recently, DEC announced that to continue with the CSLG licensing program, the University must convert to a volume purchasing fee structure. Based on the total number of computer users participating in the program, the "right to use" will cost the UW over $40,000. Media and technical support costs have also increased and are not included in the CSLG licensing program.

The only constant in the whole area of software license administration seems to be the fact that vendors will continue to raise the prices for their software. If you or your department are buying computers, be sure to budget substantial annual funds to upgrade and update your software.

C&C staff members will do everything they can to facilitate distribution of the discounted software with which they are involved. Unfortunately, some of the problems you experience obtaining discounted software may be due to forces that are largely beyond C&C's control.

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 13, May 1993
newsltr@cac.washington.edu