以應用程式虛擬化技術達成企業軟體版權管理之研究

由於今日電腦的使用已成為企業運作的一部分，且電腦是藉由執行各式各樣軟體來完成工作，所以如何在合法且經濟的前提下，管理企業電腦軟體的版權已成為企業相當頭痛的問題。現有解決方案主要是以精確統計軟體安裝數量作為訴求，對企業而言，這樣只是消極地統計軟體數量再作大筆的版權支出，無法將資源發揮至最大使用效益。因為就使用者使用某些軟體（如繪圖軟體）的時間來看，並不像使用作業系統這一類軟體來的那麼長，但在目前的現況下，企業仍須支付百分之百的版權費用，如此對企業的營運成本造成極大的負擔。近年來雖然有不少的免費軟體可以提供一些與商用軟體類似的功能，但礙於軟體間相容性及使用者轉換軟體的教育成本，真正在企業被大量使用的仍為少數。本研究發現，利用近年來愈來愈熱門的虛擬化技術，尤其是應用程式的虛擬化，可以讓單機版軟體達成如同網路版的使用效益。換句話說，企業可以由軟體的使用狀況來精確掌握使用者的需求，避免訂購過多的軟體版權數量，如此可讓企業在微利時代把營運資金花在刀口上。論文中，我們將針對應用程式虛擬化技術用於軟體版權管理的相關議題進行整理分析，同時介紹一個雛形系統來驗證此技術可行並對相關的系統效能進行分析說明。

關鍵字

軟體版權管理；應用程式虛擬化；動態資源管理；企業經營成本

並列摘要

As almost every enterprise uses the computers in its daily operations today, how to economically manage the lot of software in the computers without violating the license agreements has become an important issue for each enterprise's MIS department. This issue becomes obvious due to the fact that, the usage time of some application software is not as long as operating systems, so it is unreasonable to pay the full license fee for the users who just occasionally use these application software. Though the adoption of the open source software can reduce this kind of enterprise operation cost, few enterprises use the free software in large scale for the issues of software compatibility and the possible high training cost of new software. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use the new application virtualization technology to manage the enterprise's software license. With our proposed system, the single-user licensed software can be used by a group of network users, all of these usages are centrally controlled by the MIS department. The advantage is that the enterprise can purchase the more accurate number of software licenses than before, thus reducing the software cost legally. In this paper, we not only describe the design of the prototype system, but also discuss its performance and compare it with related work.