Licenses overview

You can perform licence administration tasks using the Licenses application.

Licenses
A license, often referred to as a license agreement, is a legal agreement that authorizes the use of proprietary information including, but not limited to, copyrighted or patented information. IBM® and other software is often licensed for use, and there are many types of software licenses.
License entitlement
In software licensing, entitlement refers to the allocation of license capacity as determined by a license agreement. Entitlement defines how you are allowed to use or access the software associated with the license.
License types
The license type is the category of license you have, according to the agreement between your organization and the vendor missuing the product license.
License platform
License platform refers to the platform base (the combination of the hardware and operating system) on which the software product is licensed to be installed and run. A license can be assigned a platform value of either MAINFRAME or DISTRIBUTED.
License capacity
License capacity is the amount of software usage allowed by the license.
Full-capacity licensing
Full-capacity licensing is a software licensing scheme that bases charges on the capacity of the entire machine or cluster of machines that is available to the licensed program, rather than on just one or more partitions.
Subcapacity licensing
Subcapacity licensing is a software licensing scheme that bases charges on the capacity of the partition where the licensed program is used, rather than on the total capacity of the server (subcapacity is limited to servers only). IBM uses two distinctly different types of subcapacity pricing, one type for IBM mainframe products and another type for IBM distributed products.
Allocated, available, and discovered license capacity
To determine if you have enough available license capacity to fulfill a user request, the Licenses application provides field information about the license capacity that is currently allocated and the capacity that remains available. A core multiplier group field is available for use in determining discovered capacity for software on specific computer or partition assets. This information summarizes, for each license, how the current capacity assignments affect the available capacity of the license.
Reserved capacity
To reserve software license capacity for future use, create a reservation for the quantity of license capacity that you want to allocate in the future.
Capacity units
Capacity units are the particular quantity that is measured to determine if a software product is used in compliance with its license. In some cases, capacity units are also used to calculate charges based on the amount of usage of the software product. That is, capacity units are a pricing metric that defines how capacity is counted and applied against your entitlement in license use reports.
Value unit exhibits
Each IBM value unit–priced software product has a specific value unit exhibit that applies to the product. The value unit exhibit is a read-only table that provides information that is used when converting a base unit, such as MSU (millions of service units), to value units.
License vendor
License vendor refers to the person or company that issues the license; for example, IBM.
License scope
Scope defines the breadth or span of a license in terms of computer, enterprise, site, logical partition, or user. A license is assigned a scope that reflects the license entitlement.
License term
Each scope in a license is covered under a license term that determines if the discovered software is counted against the license entitlement in license use reports.
License status
The status of a license indicates its state in the license procurement process. A license can be in Requested, Draft, Active, Not Ready, Expired, or Canceled status.
Software audit-readiness
As part of the ongoing need to manage license entitlements, an audit must be periodically performed to validate that the list of deployed software is accurate. Any software used above the authorized quantity is in violation of the license entitlement, and the violation must be addressed to bring the usage into compliance. Maximo IT provides license use reports that you can run to help ensure that you are audit-ready.

Parent topic: Administering licenses