I’m curious how many of you (whether you’re a foundry writing your EULA or a consumer choosing fonts) have pondered the decision of whether to license fonts by CPU or by User. The former seems to me to be an antiquated method of accounting for printers and other devices at a single location, back when offices were more centralized, so I instinctively lean toward User. On the other hand, for some organizations it’s easier to track the number of devices on which a font is installed than it is the number of simultaneous users. While larger companies probably have a better records of people who will be using the fonts. I wonder if there are issues with this that I haven’t considered.
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Not a bad idea to have an alternate CPU-based license on hand for the occasional corporate user who requires it—and to freely adjust pricing to reflect the change.
Now if we could find a sensible volume unit for websites...
EULA definitions affect things, particularly when well-considered. CPU licensing makes sense for some businesses.
If a EULA gives a licensee one option, it will likely be interpreted according to their "best-case" scenario (e.g. CPU, Workstation, Device, User… some other thing). It's amazing how many assumptions are made, quite a minefield. Identifying the specific details with licensors is often no less befuddling, time-consuming and riddled with uncertainty on both sides.
E.g. It's nice to chat about the details, but it doesn't always reflect the reality. In the case of legal dispute, lawyers will argue both sides – not the "right" side.
I agree that the CPU model is a bit antiquated, though not for the same reasons @Stephen Coles gave. We were never concerned with making customers secure licensing for printers and other devices. We were, in fact, always concerned with trying to be more permissive not less. The question one got back in the day with "user" licensing was "what if two people use the same computer?" So, back then we went with CPU pricing in order to be able to say that a company didn't have to double pay for that one computer. Of course, that's no longer needed.
But the problem with the user based model is that it's still a little hard to track for companies that may not be up to date with technology for user profile management.
If we were opening our shop today we'd probably be using the user model. However, change is also confusing so we decided with the last couple EULA rewrites to keep the old CPU model on the theory that all things being equal change is worse for customer confusion.
You may notice that our latest EULA introduces the idea of virtual machines - which starts to move towards a user model. My hope is that by the next rewrite the customer base will have moved more in that direction and we can make that more dominant.