Microsoft Moves To Patent Time-Based Software Licensing

theodp writes "Microsoft's Open Value Subscription offering didn't get the warmest reception. Nor did the follow-up announcement of Albany, a planned MS-Office Subscription Service. Now comes word from the USPTO that Microsoft feels it deserves a patent for the 'invention' of 'Time-Based Licensing,' which aims to make the traditional pay-once perpetual license model a thing of the past. Hey, if your customers were waiting nine years between OS upgrades, you'd try touting a three-year lease with a balloon buy-out payment, too!"

Re:Give me a break... time keeps on ticking into..

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

So.. we can have more time based software licensing? Yeah, I'll get right on that.

I was once part of an in house testing group of a software package. Even in pre alpha stage dev, they time limited the testing builds. I guess it was to entice us to always test with the latest, rather than the stable version from last month. That's about the only good use of it I've known.

Re:Dangerous move

[^_^x]

Yeah. Now that I'm out of school and can afford to, I buy my copies of Windows. If they charged by time period, I wouldn't be against cracking them again.

I really should...

[sbeckstead]

I implemented this system in it's entirety with another engineer back about 6 years ago. Complete with the license server and the multiple parameters of the license. Is there a way to protest this being patented? It's still in daily use for my wife's company. They even get updates based on whether they have paid the license fee for the month.

Re:I really should...

[mmandt]

I implemented a time-based licensing scheme in 2002. Which is very much the same as the product microsoft launched to do this. I thought of patenting it, but didn't. I would like to object as well. We still use it...

Re:Give me a break... time keeps on ticking into..

[thejynxed]

My copy of Kaspersky Antivirus does much of what they are claiming:

Claims 1, 2, 4, 9-15, 17-20 for sure.

In fact, most AV software works in this manner, and has for years.

Re:Hi, Microsoft!

[elashish14]

Microsoft's fundamental problem is that they've already sold many people what they need. XP works fine for me. I don't need Vista. Or 7. Office is fine. I don't care about the next round of bells and whistles. Most of what most of us do doesn't require them.

Except Microsoft chooses which you can use. Soon they'll stop selling licenses for XP, you can already only get it on netbooks, and even they probably know that XP is a better product, but force Vista on you anyways. And the same goes for Office - not that I've looked, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy Office 2003 if you wanted to.

This is the failure of the software-by-one-company-for-profit model.