Software licenses as mobile objects in distributed computing environments

  • Authors:

  • Claudio Cacciari;Daniel Mallmann;Csilla Zsigri;Francesco D'Andria;Björn Hagemeier;David García Peréz;Angela Rumpl;Wolfgang Ziegler;Miriam Gozalo;Josep Martrat

  • Affiliations:

  • CINECA, Casalecchio di Reno, Italy;Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany;The 451 Group, London, United Kingdom;Atos Origin - Research and Innovation, Barcelona, Spain;Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany;Foundation CESGA, Santiago de Compostela, Spain;Fraunhofer Institute SCAI, Sankt Augustin, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute SCAI, Sankt Augustin, Germany;Gridcore AB, Göteborg, Sweden;Atos Origin - Research and Innovation, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Euro-Par 2010 Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Parallel processing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Current praxis of software licensing has been identified as major obstacle for Grid computing a couple of years ago already. Recent surveys of Clouds indicate that the same holds true for Cloud computing. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited until recently in distributed computing environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage during application run-time traditional software licensing practices are not suitable. In this paper we present a novel approach for managing software licenses as web service resources in distributed service oriented environments. Licenses become mobile objects, which may move to the environment where required to authorise the execution of a license protected application. The SmartLM solution, which has been recently implemented as a prototype decouples authorisation for license usage from authorisation for application execution.