Actually a very salient point.

Still, I don't like the reality because it obscures the bad parts of where we are.

I've seen a slew of software licencing models in my travels. I hate where we have wound up.

Some of my more-appreciated ones:

- Not-Crappy-Hardware-Lock:
- When I was in the RF/HFC Drafting industry, a very entrenched program was utilized for most signal level calculations. This company used a solution that involved a Parallel or USB Device that took a Vendor-provided Dallas one-wire device. You paid X$ for the software, you had updates up to X date with that key. They did have a way to 'upgrade' but I don't remember what that involved as we never did it. The system seemed fair, I'm guessing it was fairly PITA to hack (remember, in this industry you have access to a decent number of people with good signal analysis equipment) but also had a fair cost standpoint.
- It was nice that "Who can use it" was just tossing a key around.

- Usage + Audit:
- Same industry. Market forces led us to also have a product from a vendor that also competed with the biggest CAD vendor out there. This company essentially had a multi-stage setup; The systems running the software would check in with our locally-installed license server running on a box, license server would periodically check in with vendor's home-base server (uploading our usage data and downloading some response, I'd assume). If there were any issues with our usage the vendor would call us and inquire as to what was up.
- If your machine was not going to be able to check in to the license server (i.e. Field use, this was also before mobile hotspots were cheap, and not too many corps had proper VPN setups) you could 'check-out' a license and generate a time-expiring key
- They were WAY WAY more than fair. Our usage was balance out based on some algo on their end. IDK quite how it worked, but for example; if you had 3 licenses, didn't use any Monday or Tuesday, 2 on wednesday, but then had 4 people simultaneously using on Thursday/Friday, they didn't care.
- When somebody who may have been me left the app up for a month and had a checked out license for a laptop, while we were in crunch mode and others were using the application, we eventually did get a phone call. But even during the conversation they discussed the amount of logged time and it didn't result in any penalties or fees.
- We got updates as long as we paid a fairly low maintenance fee. If we stopped paying updates, we only could use up to a certain version.
- Seriously, maintainers of the DGN format, you guys were amazing about licensing and just great to deal with.

- Per-Seat licenses:
- Arguably the most fair
- You know what you're getting
- Can do either with a central reg or reporting server
- Possibly more balanced than above towards vendor, definitely lower maintenance level.

- Jetbrains style licensing:
- Similar to Usage + Audit, but only the usage part
- Works well. I dig it.
- But seriously, what is up with the awkward 2-factor setup?

- SAAS:
- How would you like to be charged today?
- Vendor Lock-in
- Change Friction
- Don't own the hardware
- Offloading of liability

Unfortunately, SAAS wins out because it's the best way to make money, especially when one considers that last bullet point. But also, when you consider 'base' charges versus 'overage'; as an industry we might be diving head-first into the same malarkey that we have complained about in places like this, or forums, or even usenet groups; the forced minimum pricing/bundling of services.

What's ironic here (for me,anyway) is that Cloud computing used to be different; you used to just be able to buy a hosted server. Somehow we jumped from that straight to the current model instead of more consumer-friendly concept of burstable VMs.