Licensing Web Services: The Rising

Licensing is the fundamental way for distribution of software, designing business relationships and strategies. The seamless explosion of web services demands a similar attention, in order to address legal and commercial issues. The nature of web services precludes the adoption of a license model as it stands now for software, requiring a detailed dimensional analysis of services. These dimensions together with service properties fashion the licensing paradigm of web services. In this paper, we analyze the dimensions of web services that differ from software and induce them for a new paradigm of licensing. Further, we propose the key negotiation issues in licensing web services. © 2006 IEEE.