Our company sells source code. We would be interested in distributing our products via Perforce. There are numerous advantages to this over the way we distribute now. However, the cost of a Perforce license for each of our customers would be prohibitive, even if we passed it on to the customer. Perforce does support the special "remote" user which doesn't need a license, but it doesn't allow us to control access among different customers.

I have submitted the following proposal to Perforce technical support. Essentially, they said "the current simple licensing scheme works just fine" and suggested that if I had something different to offer, that I show it to the user's list for comment. Therefore, I would appreciate your review and discussion of this proposal:

The license key would include 2 user counts: # of users licensed for write access # of users licensed for read-only access

A current license for N users would be converted to N writers + 0 readers. Perforce customers could purchase additional read-only licenses on behalf of their indirect customers, presumably at a reduced cost compared to writable licenses.

In addition to being useful for software distribution, such read-only licenses would be attractive for internal users in tech support, QA, management, etc.

Although this would seem to decrease the revenue to Perforce in the short term, since it would allow read-only users to pay less for their licenses, in the long term I believe it would increase revenue for Perforce due to more total users.

Please respond to the user's list with your comments.

Thanks, Glenn