Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective / quote 24 of 28
Service offerings as meta-commitments
Indeed, the very same software product can be sold at different prices by different companies, under different licensing policies. The result is that software products come to market in the form of service offerings, which concern product-service bundles. According to [22], a service offering is in turn based on the notion of service, which is a bundle of social commitments that under certain circumstances can trigger the execution of certain ac- tions by a service provider. Service offerings are therefore meta-commitments, i.e., they are commitments to engage in specific commitments (namely, the delivery of certain services) once a contract is signed.