Limiting logons to licensed number: how?

Henry Schaffer hes at ecsvax.UUCP
Sat Aug 3 13:44:08 AEST 1985


Really Re: charging more for allowing more
logins on the system.
  There are many examples where it doesn't
cost the provider any more to supply one extra
user (perhaps over some range ofusers.) 
Examples include use of the operating system,
use of the computer hardware, and use of a
toll bridge.  (At least this is true for all
users except the last one who saturates the
system.  Then you must build another bridge, or
whatever.  In all these cases, each user before
the last one objects to paying anything, and the last user will probably
agree to pay as much as 1/n'th of the cost of  a
system.  The compromise usually is having
everybody pay 1/n'th.
  I think this is what vendors are trying to do
with pricing licenses according to the no. of
logins permitted.
  P.S. Pricing of computer resources is, to me,
a difficult and fasciniting topic, and one
that university computing people have to deal
with often.
--henry schaffer  n c state univ



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