Moving to revamp its Unix software licensing programme, ICL Plc has gone to Palo Alto, California-based Highland Software Inc for its software licence manager, Flexlm. According to Highland, Flexlm is designed to make software licensing more flexible for the user and easier for the licensor to administrate. For both parties it monitors the number of users logged into software, how often it is used and reports back licence infringements. When they buy a licence to a piece of software, customers will be issued with a set of right-to-use electronic keys that unlock the operating system for a specified number of users, ICL says. One key can be authorised for up to 250 users. The new flexible licensing programme will also – for the first time – enable users to take a product licence for a given number of users on a local area network, irrespective of hardware system or the number of systems. Each local network has to have its own licence and cannot be bridged over wide area network connections. ICL will start distributing trial packages bundled with DRS/NX V7 in June – with full implementations embedded with DRS/NX V8 due for release in the first quarter next year. Hewlett-Packard Co, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems Inc have also licensed Highland’s software.
