>The last I knew, most commercial document management systems were licensed
>on a "per-potential user" basis -- you buy as many licenses as there are
>people at your site that might sometime use their software. Could anyone
>from one of these companies comment on whether use of a gateway would
>constitute one user (i.e. the HTTP server) or multiple users (each person
>that accesses a Web document controlled by the document management
We're not precisely a doc management system, but what we sell is quite
similar. We use multiple pricing models. Sometimes it's per-seat,
sometimes it's per concurrent user.
However, the nature of the Web makes those models hard to apply, so we're
going to drop them for our server. We're using a one-time price (plus
maintenance) that will allow unlimited use on one CPU. And we'll also sell
one or more browsers that we'll OEM, which ends up being rather similar to
selling per-seat, but without the kind of ambiguities that you've
described.
I suspect that everyone in this business is going to have to evolve similar
models or be left behind.
Nick