What type of metrics do we use to license cows? It could be ?per user? licensing based on the human usage ?per cow? or perhaps ?per moo-cow?? It sounds funny, doesn?t it? However, it is not a joke! Kornel Girardi’s article was published in daily ‘Világgazdaság’ (in Hungarian).
I am not an agronomist or an agricultural engineer and ethology does not appeal to me, nevertheless, I learned the other day that in stock farming a variety of very complex technologies used to monitor the behavior and the wellbeing of the animals.
In order to increase productivity (and profit), farmers do everything to get information about milk and meat provider stock. Measuring probes placed on these beeves automatically collect data in real time and store large quantities of it. These can be clinical parameters about the health of the animal, core body heat, pulse, respiratory rate, PH and temperature of the rumen fluid, the position of the animal on the meadow with GPS coordinates, behavior or graze features (pedometer or bite counter). Farmers can reach data on smart devices.
The farmer has to play the role of the ?license-farmer? as well and deal with this technology from the license management side. To prove the legal usage of the software the user organization has to have the license contract and can only use these software products regarding the metrics of the contract. It is necessary to have proof of the software purchase, namely the bill. The collected measurement data regarding the size and quantity has to be stored in a suitable database server and probably these servers have to be licensed as well (depending on the products of the software vendor). This is not the end of the story and the crucial part is yet to begin because to reach the data on servers we have to have the access licenses for the network server.
One can only wonder what kind of access licenses do we have to purchase for the sensors on cows.
Software vendors are not prepared for this yet! So many vendors, so many changing rules, terminologies, and license metrics. Which makes it even more complicated is that usually a given software product can be purchased in different constructions. These different license constructions give different usage rights to users.
In case of humans ?per user? licensing is in practice, which means that if there is more than one given device the license owner can decide to choose the ?per user? solution which requires fewer licenses than the ?per device? licensing. The ?Named user? metric provided by some of the vendors can be applied for cows such as licenses dedicated to Daisy and Angus.
So far as we know, it is not possible to choose the creature based licensing. Is there nothing for it, then, but to purchase ?per device? the access licenses (even if it is significantly more than the number of the animals) for the service software products. Of course, depending on the software vendor and product we can choose licensing based on software cores on the server side. In this case, it is not necessary to purchase access licenses.
I am waiting for the first vendor to give a chance to license per creature!
