GeoWeb Business/Licensing Models

Earlier this week James Fee had a provocative post on licensing models for the GeoWeb and his frustration with how users have to buy ESRI, Oracle, MSFT, Google etc. Lots of valid complaints in the posts and the follow up comments, and it got me thinking about what the options are out there for licensing. Further, what would make end users happiest or least frustrated. So, I took a stab at laying out the options I’m aware of:

Per seat licensing – there are “x” number of seats and those can be swapped between users, but the number of users on the application cannot go above number paid for.

Per named user licensing – each account for the application is named specifically to the user with a unique password and login.

Capacity based licensing – there is a set fee paid for the amount of capacity provided by the application. This can take the form of storage, bandwidth, CPU cycles etc and is usually elastic in that in can be increased and decreased on the fly, priced accordingly. This model has been popularized by Amazon Web Services.

CPU/core based licensing – similar to capacity based pricing where the price of application varies by the number of cores needed to run your expected load.

Concurrent user licensing – the application is licensed based on the the number of concurrent users the system can handle. Configurations that handle more concurrent users are priced higher.

Transaction based licensing – the user pays for the service on a per transaction basis. Typically firms will sell blocks of transactions for the application for a set fee usually with some flavor of a volume discount.

Widget/feature based licensing – the user pays for the widget or feature they need for their base application. Typically the base application is licensed from on one of the models above and each widget or feature is licensed separately. These widgets/features can be from the application provider or a third party. The iPhone app-store being the latest incarnation of this model.

Open Source – the application is licensed under one of several open source licensing models. While the software is often free there can also be additional priced licensing for support or contracts for consulting and implementation. In the geo space Cloudmade and OpenGeo are good examples of support and consulting for open source applications respectively.

** many of these models can also come in the form perpetual licenses with maintenance cost (10-30%) on the out years, or subscription models where there is a recurring fee but not maintenance costs.

Each licensing model has its positives and negative which may make for a good follow on post if there is interest. I’m most curious though about which model folks feel best about when deploying GeoWeb/GIS projects. Often times it is a blend and not one size fits all, so any comments on combos would be interesting as well. Also if I missed any models please let me know.