Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective / quote 3 of 28
The licensed software product
Now, on the basis of these observations, we believe there is another kind of soft- ware artifact emerging, which has a strong social nature: a Licensed Software Product. Such an artifact, which is constituted by a software product, comes into existence when a software product is bought, and it historically depends on a pre-existing service offer- ing concerning a product-service bundle with a certain licensing scheme. So, while, at a given time, there is only one software product named MS Word for PC, there are many licensed products (one for each customer), each one in turn being encoded in several licensed copies. The essential property of a licensed software product is the mutual commitment relationship existing between the vendor and the customer.