In 1912 a man named Elias stood in a wood shop and he worked the same lathe that three other men used throughout the day and the owner of the shop bought the lathe once and he never had to pay a tax for the specific hands that touched the wood. The iron was the tool and the tool was the cost and the men were simply the energy that moved the parts and nobody in the accounting office thought to ask if Elias had a personal permit to pull the lever because the permit stayed with the machine.

We have lost this logic and we have replaced it with a tax on the soul and we call it user-based licensing and it is a lie built for people who work from nine in the morning until five in the evening and it breaks the moment the world keeps spinning past dark.

The Midnight Desk

The night charge nurse walks down a hall that smells like floor wax and old coffee and she sits at a desk where the light from the monitor is the only thing keeping the shadows back. She types her name and she types her password and the server in the basement wakes up and it looks for a license.

The morning nurse used this same desk and she sat in this same chair and she looked at these same patient charts for eight hours before she went home to her kids and then the evening nurse did the same thing and now it is the turn of the night shift. In the eyes of the hospital there is one desk and one chair and one computer and one task but in the eyes of the software company there are three distinct human beings who must be paid for individually.

This is where the math of the modern world fails the people who actually run it because the licensing spreadsheet in the office upstairs lists three entries for three nurses and it demands three fees for the right to touch one keyboard. The hospital pays three times for the same work station and they pay three times for the same pixels and they pay three times for the same electricity and nobody stops to ask why we are charging the person instead of the tool.

It is a slow drain on the budget and it adds up across fifty desks and three shifts and suddenly the IT manager is looking at a bill for a hundred and fifty people when he only has fifty computers in the building. Software companies love the user model because it is easy to sell to a man in a suit who works in a high rise where every person has their own laptop and their own phone and their own little world.

In that world the user is the unit of value and the user is the thing that generates the profit so the user is the thing you tax. But the world of the warehouse and the world of the clinic and the world of the security gate does not work that way and it never has. In those places the station is the unit of value and the person is just the one who happens to be standing there at four in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep.

The Invisible Robbery

I spend my days looking at data and I try to teach machines how to understand the messy reality of human life and I see this mismatch everywhere I look. I recently sent a long and angry text message about this very subject to my sister but I clicked the wrong name and I sent it to a guy who was trying to sell me a used lawnmower and he just replied with a question mark.

It was embarrassing but it stayed in my head because it reminded me that most people do not even know they are being robbed by a default setting. They just see the bill and they pay it and they assume that this is just how the digital world works because they have been told that the user is the only thing that matters.

User vs. Device: The Bet

When you set up a Remote Desktop Services environment you are given a choice and it is a choice that the sales team will usually skip over because it is not good for their commission. You can license the user or you can license the device. If you license the user you are betting that your people are the static thing and the machines are the fluid thing. This works for a sales team that travels with tablets and laptops and phones and they all want to reach the same server from different places.

But if you are a hospital or a factory or a 24-hour call center you are betting on the machine. The computer stays bolted to the desk and it never leaves and it never gets tired and it never goes home to sleep. The people change but the device remains and that is where the savings hide.

If you buy a Device CAL you are paying for the right of that specific piece of hardware to talk to the server and it does not matter if one person uses it or if a hundred people use it during the week. The server sees the hardware ID and it says you are allowed to be here and it lets the nurse do her job without checking her birth certificate or her employee ID number.

The

RDS CAL Store

is one of the few places that actually explains this clearly because most big vendors want you to stay on the per-user path since it is a path paved with extra money.

There is a quiet arrogance in the way software is priced today and it assumes that everyone works in a climate controlled office with a dedicated desk and a personalized mouse pad. It ignores the guard who watches the monitors at the shipping port and it ignores the mechanic who logs into the parts database for ten minutes a day and it ignores the three nurses who share a single station in the oncology ward.

I think about that factory in 1912 and I wonder what Elias would think of a world where he had to pay for a new wrench every time his shift started even though the wrench was already sitting there on the bench. He would think it was a scam and he would be right. We have dressed it up in terms like scalability and identity management and seat counts but it is still just a way to extract more value from a situation that has not changed in a hundred years. A tool is a tool and a station is a station.

If you are running a business where the lights never go out you have to stop thinking like a software developer in California and start thinking like a floor manager in a steel mill. You have to look at the hardware and you have to count the chairs and you have to realize that the most expensive thing you can do is license the blood instead of the iron.

Counting the Points of Access

Every time a new person logs into a shared machine under a user-based model a little bit of your budget vanishes for no reason other than a lack of imagination in the licensing department. The IT manager who is under pressure to cut costs usually looks at the hardware or the cloud fees or the internet bill but he rarely looks at the way the licenses are shaped.

He just assumes that he needs a license for every name in the active directory and he never stops to count how many of those names are actually in the building at the same time. It is a failure of observation and it is a failure of logic. If you have thirty people but only ten desks then you only have ten points of access and that is where your cost should live.

I see this in my work as a curator of data where we try to find the truth in the noise and the noise is usually just a set of bad assumptions that have been repeated so often they become law. We assume the user is the center of the universe because that is what the marketing tells us but the center of the universe for a night nurse is the screen in front of her face that tells her which patient needs help.

She does not care about the license and she does not care about the seat count and she should not have to be a line item on a spreadsheet that costs her department thousands of dollars just because she exists in a different time zone than the boss. There is a freedom in the device model that people do not talk about enough.

When you license the device you stop caring about turnover and you stop caring about part-time workers and you stop caring about contractors who only come in on the weekends. You buy the entitlement for the machine and you are done. It is a perpetual right for that station to exist in your network and it simplifies everything because you can count desks a lot faster than you can count people. People move and people quit and people get hired but the desk stays exactly where you put it.

The Disconnected Future

I feel a certain weight when I see these licensing errors because it reminds me how much waste we accept as a cost of doing business. We have become used to the idea that software should be expensive and complicated and we have forgotten that it is just a tool meant to help us work. When the tool starts demanding a fee for every hand that touches it the tool has stopped serving us and we have started serving the tool.

The next time you walk through a clinic or a warehouse at midnight look at the people working and count the screens. If the number of screens is smaller than the number of people who work there across twenty-four hours then you are looking at a place that is likely being overcharged by a factor of two or three. It is a silent tax on productivity and it is one of the easiest things to fix if you just have the courage to choose the model that fits your reality instead of the model that fits the software company’s quarterly goals.

We are moving into a future where everything is a subscription and everything is a recurring cost and the idea of owning a tool is becoming a memory. But in the small corners of the infrastructure where the work gets done there is still a place for the old logic of the wood shop and the lathe. There is still a way to buy the license once and let it sit on the machine where it belongs and let the people come and go as they need to. It is not the path that the sales reps will put in their slide decks but it is the path that makes sense for anyone who has ever had to log into a computer after the sun has gone down.

I think about the text message I sent to the wrong person and I realize that my frustration was not just about the technical details but about the lack of common sense. We have built a digital world that is at odds with the physical world and we are all paying the price for that disconnect.

The night nurse just wants to check the charts and the warehouse worker just wants to scan the box and neither of them should be a source of triple-dipped revenue for a company that does not understand how their shift works. It is time to go back to the lathe and the wrench and the device and it is time to stop taxing the rotation.