Charting a course for software licensing and distribution
Michael H. Cooper · 2010
Software licensing and distribution poses many opportunities for cost savings while delivering a greater ability for students and employees to use cost-effective, leading edge technology to accomplish their tasks. Using available licensing programs from major publishers can be difficult because of the contractual commitments and often misunderstood complexities of those programs. Each publisher has its own licensing criteria for obtaining products. Product support must be considered when acquiring any title for campus-wide use. Educational institutions will often embrace open source software to overcome these obstacles. While that is a possible solution, commercial software products are often a better choice. West Virginia University embarked upon a centralized approach for widely used commercial software in 2002. The program has evolved to providing products from several publishers. The campus-wide distribution of software uses a combination of cost recovery and centralized funding. Students and employees can purchase products at significant savings for personal use. Institutional users can easily obtain the tools to prepare their course material and share those same tools with their students. Software licensing involves several entities within the institution such as the legal department, procurement, network administration, customer support, academic affairs, student affairs, information security, and information technology. With that in mind, let's explore how you can develop your software licensing and distribution program so that it becomes a key component for driving cost containment, integrates product use standards, and provides long-term organizational benefits.