My ZDNet colleagues Ed Bott and David Gewirtz are both fed up with Microsoft over software licensing issues, albeit for different reasons.
Ed is annoyed with Microsoft over its poor communication of its Windows editions and Davidjust wants to line up Microsoft's legal department in front of a firing squad.
Let's be absolutely clear -- figuring out software licensing, regardless of which vendor you are dealing with, is never fun. I never enjoyed it when I was an IT consultant in the financial sector, I hated it when I worked as a systems architect at IBM, and I certainly don't enjoy it today in my role at Microsoft.
Dammit Jim, I'm a technical solutions professional, not a lawyer!
I can't tell you how many times a week I need to have conversations with my partners about things that are possible from a technology standpoint, but impossible to do from a licensing standpoint.
More often than not, I need to bring in a licensing specialist to clarify language. And then if we can't figure it out, the specialist has to reach out to others that are SMEs on the specific product licensing that can give me an official reading.
This problem is not unique to Microsoft; this is a problem that is endemic to the entire enterprise software industry.
Why is software so complex to license correctly and why are there are so many SKUs and editions? Let's count the reasons -- localization issues and judicial decrees, different sets of customers having different sets of needs and being in different sectors (public vs. private) -- but the real problem stems down to compliance.
I can't go into exact detail how much revenue is lost by large software vendors by incorrectly reported software usage -- whether intentional or unintentional -- but what I can say is that the reason why the legal teams for these enterprise software companies are so large is that quarterly/yearly compliance audits and settlements with large companies can often shift revenue reporting in a business segment from "meh" to "good" or "good" to "excellent".
On the consumer side of the business, software piracy is also a very serious problem, one that directly affects the bottom line. These lawyers that you hate allow these large software companies to continue to produce the software that you as consumers and businesses use, by going after the bad guys.
Compliance and anti-piracy efforts can make the difference between hitting your numbers as a business and not.
Part of the reason that these compliance audits have to occur is that reporting is often a manual process. It's hard for enterprises to inventory their software and OSes and get an accurate picture of their usage, particularly when you start looking at licensing models that dive into the number of cores per server you are using rather than the number of seats.
