elasticLM: A novel approach for software licensing in distributed computing infrastructures

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments, especially when the environment stretches across administrative domains like it is the case for public Clouds. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application.