Patent ID: 7013294

Claim:
A license management system for software which drives a single computer or a plurality of computers, comprising: an application program requesting a decision of a number of licenses required to drive itself and receiving issuance of the licenses; a number of licenses decision unit determining the necessary number of licenses in accordance with the request from the application program based on the following multi-nominal function: LK=f(x 1 , x 2 ,. . . , xn) wherein, LK is the number of licenses, and x 1 to xn are parameters for the LK, which are required to determine the number of licenses, and which are set in accordance with hardware resources used by a user; and a licenses management unit issuing the number of licenses determined by the number of licenses decision unit, the application program being constituted so as to be able to start a plurality of processes in parallel, the parameters for the LK being, on the hardware resources, the number of CPUs, the capacity of memory, the capacity of vacant memory, the type of platform, and the size of a data file to be processed, and thereby determining the number of parallel processes that are able to be started in parallel by the application program on the hardware resources and finding the number of licenses based on the number of the parallel processes.