Re: IBM i hosting "in the cloud"

[Lukas Beeler <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 19:33, Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The second and by far and away more difficult side is the method to
> order, obtain license keys and pay for temporary use of the software.
> IBMs business systems are just not set up to handle that type of
> transaction and until they are (if ever) a short term software lease
> model is just not feasible.

I like how Microsoft has solved this problem. Most of their big
business applications just work. No licensing is enforced.

The only thing where you actually need to worry about licenses is the
OS and Office - both of which can be activated with KMS (Setup a DNS
entry, then install a KMS Key on your KMS server - done). KMS does not
actually enforce anything, so if you need 50 more licenses today and
order them tomorrow, there's no break of any functionality.

IBM should probably do the same for hosting systems, and trust the
hosting provider to do the proper license accounting.