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The article is about Oracle software, but could be applied to almost any software. This is especially a problem when virtualization is taken into account. This is but one demonstration of how the legal world and technical world can collide with unknown and very abstract consequences. I'm sure there is a program out there to manage software licenses in these complex situations or soon will be. This dangerous mix of lawyers and technologists will be an interesting mix to see what happens. Comments from members that have dealt with such situations solicited and welcome. There must be some common sense solutions, hopefully.
In the EDA software world there's a de-facto standard for software licensing with the FlexLM product, so each company knows exactly how many licenses they are using.
In the Semiconductor IP world there have been proposals for standardizing on how IP is accounted for, so this is still an open issue of counting how many times a particular IP block has been used and if there are any royalties due for its use.
