Service license life cycle

Services enable the collaboration of distributed systems by interacting beyond the organizational boundaries. Being the mechanism of technology transfer, licensing becomes the fundamental concept in distribution of services, designing business relationships and strategies. Service licensing is a significant way to manage the rights of service consumers and service providers. In this paper, we compare service level agreements and service licenses and we propose the phases of a service license during its life span. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the proposal of a service license life cycle with a meteorological case study.