I don't speak for either Oracle or for IBM in an official capacity, but
I'll take an educated guess: history. Most of Oracle's corporate history
and technical practice involved customers deploying its software to
discrete servers as individual workloads: one or maybe a pair of servers
per application with widely varying but generally small numbers of users
per application. You've got to license your commercial software somehow,
and those systems don't have SMF or anything remotely like it (even if you
wanted to force customers to buy and to install something), so they picked
servers and processors as the quantity basis for their licensing.
("Servers" and "processors" were the same thing for many years in that
world, generally speaking.) What other options did they have? Then they've
refined that licensing a bit over time. They introduced "core multipliers"
some years ago, for example. Everything is install-based rather than
execution-based because, again, what other choice was there?
IBM mainframes were never like that (in the vast majority of cases).
They've "always" been shared computing resources supporting multiple
applications across multiple constituencies, at first sequentially then
concurrently. The number of processors (cores) was never a particularly
good or sufficiently granular measurement of capacity and value, especially
across model generations, so IBM figured out something else that made at
least adequate sense, with refinements and improvements since. Detailed
system accounting data are available and work, so there are simply more
license metric possibilities.
However, the trend has been for non-mainframe software to get more pricey
and more complex to license. There are now term licenses, restricted use
licenses, tiered editions ("standard," "professional," "advanced
professional," etc.), in-application feature licensing, advertising removal
licensing, limitations and licenses per virtual image, concurrent/floating
user licenses, registered/authorized user licenses, doubly required
server/core and user licenses, role-based licenses, device licenses,
terabyte-based licenses, network port-based licenses, various "cloud"
licensing metrics (e.g. CPU-hours!), point-scored license calculations and
curves for all of the above, prior version restrictions and rights,
documentation and media fees, authorized support personnel fees, etc., etc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: [email protected]
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