BMD to implement software rental

Mr. Getty stated that large organizations can rent fusion instead of purchasing. Saying that this will make it easier for them to have many seats. Wonder if resolve will also be distributed like this. He said that purchasing the software will always be available and that the rental option us not available to individual users. Hope its stays that way

Ricardo Marty

I believe this is more due to deployment management and corporate user base rotation than a shift in licensing for individual users.

BMD have had a very humble approach when it comes to licensing and with the constant increasing user base there’s no real panic in making it harder or more restrictive but instead ease the administrative work for corporate deployments.

When businesses take on contract work and possibly have temporary employees per project they may want to scale their licenses with the number of employees working on a contract and be able to charge the license(s) to the contract.

With traditional perpetual licenses this can be a bit difficult: consider that if you have 30 people working on a project and charge the licenses to the project, then when the next project comes up and you only have 20 people working on it, you have already paid for the licenses, so you can't realistically charge the project for those licenses, but then it is "unfair" to the first project as they paid the cost of the licenses that the second project is benefiting from. When project three comes around and you need 40 people working on it, how do you explain that they need to pay for 10 licenses because you already had 30, and that the next project which requires 50 licenses will need to pay the same amount for 10 more licenses even though there are more people working on that project?

This is probably the one scenario in which the "rental" approach to licensing makes sense, because the cost can go directly to the project for exactly the number of licenses that are needed and the period of time that they are needed for, without trying to figure out who to charge what for them or otherwise "eating" the cost of the licenses.


Personally, I still *hate* the very notion of subscription-based licensing for software of this nature - but I do acknowledge that there is a case to be made for it in specific scenarios such as this one, and this is what BMD seems to be aiming this option at.

For big studios this sometimes works in 100s not 10s, eg. you "suddenly" need 500 of Nuke licenses.
I think all big studios are now operating on OpEx model as this works out better for them.
Best to offer all options as a software provider.