Earlier this month Bill posted his thoughts on software development tools licensing. After several busy weeks of programming for three different clients, I'm finally catching up on reading, but I was too late to post a comment over on Bill's blog, so I'm sharing my thoughts over here.
I'm surprised that the more expensive, less frequently used software development tools don't usually come with floating licenses. The big mechanical engineering packages that I'm familiar with (Nastran, ANSYS, Unigraphics, Catia, Ideas, etc.) can be installed on all users' machines, and then you set up a license server and "check out" a license when you use the tool. If all the licenses are checked out, you bug the guy at the next machine to wrap up his work and quit so you can do your thing. Or you work in the middle of the night, as we all did in graduate school at the end of the semester when everyone was wrapping up projects. At a previous job, when things got particularly busy, we purchased a three month floating license for our finite element software to get us by without us killing one another. In addition, we had the option of checking out the license to a laptop so that we could work when off the company intranet.
Just as Mike Woelmer has experienced with Compuware (see the comments on Bill's post), a single floating license for Matlab or ANSYS or other packages is almost twice as much as getting a single seat, so you have to anticipate several occasional users for it to be worth it. Why haven't the software development tool makers adopted this model, like the mechanical engineering tool makers have?