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House rules

From the LICENSEWARE WikiLast edited 4 ReferencesCited

This article is about the LICENSEWARE Wiki operating model for catalog rows and encyclopedia pages, not a vendor product license.

On This Page

This page is the operating model for the LICENSEWARE Wiki, a dual-surface encyclopedia of software licensing. It states how catalog rows and encyclopedia pages relate, what counts as a fact, and the order of work. It is not a product page and it does not replace existing vendor galleries.

Purpose

The LICENSEWARE Wiki has two coupled jobs: a structured catalog of vendor identity, SKU, metric, program, and use-rights facts, and a cited encyclopedia that teaches a practitioner how to compute an effective license position (ELP) from those rows.

The competitive frame is Flexera Technopedia on identity + SKU + use-rights + rules, not on listing five million hardware products.[1] This era of the LICENSEWARE Wiki is software only. Hardware catalogs, HAM, CVE and vulnerability feeds, power and sustainability specs, and hardware SKU graphs are out of scope. Do not expand the catalog to match Technopedia hardware breadth.

Surfaces

The LICENSEWARE Wiki is two surfaces, not a blog with a glossary.

  1. Catalog databases — first-class rows for publishers, products, versions, editions, SKUs, metrics, programs, rules, evidence, and sources. Vendor License Metrics is a first-class database, not an appendix.
  2. Encyclopedia pages — practitioner articles that explain how to compute ELP from those rows: which metric applies, which floor, which virtualization or partitioning rule, which program overlay, and which vendor document says so.

A catalog row without an encyclopedia path is a fact with no method. An encyclopedia page without catalog rows is commentary without identity.

Entity graph

Facts travel this chain. Do not collapse Metric into a glossary field on Product.

Publisher → Product → Version → Edition → SKU → Metric → Program → Rule → Evidence → Source

flowchart LR
  Pub["Publisher"] --> Prod["Product"] --> Ver["Version"] --> Ed["Edition"] --> SKU["SKU"]
  SKU --> Met["Metric"]
  SKU --> Prog["Program"]
  Met --> Rule["Rule"]
  Prog --> Rule
  Rule --> Ev["Evidence"] --> Src["Source"]
  • Publisher — the contracting vendor.
  • Product — the licensed software family.
  • Version — a dated release line the vendor still names in price lists or Product Terms.
  • Edition — the commercial edition the SKU actually sells.
  • SKU — the purchasable part number or offering.
  • Metric — the vendor-named unit of measure. Own database. Never a free-text tag.
  • Program — the commercial wrapper (ULA, Enterprise Agreement, Passport Advantage, and equivalents) only when a vendor document names it.
  • Rule — a dated counting, floor, partitioning, or use-rights statement.
  • Evidence — the extract that supports the rule.
  • Source — the vendor document URL, title, effective date, and retrieved date.

Metric is its own database, not a glossary appendix on the product page.

Metric database rules

The metric database is the spine of ELP math.

  • The name is the vendor’s name (Named User Plus, Processor, Core, PVU, FUE), not a normalized house synonym.
  • The definition is the vendor’s wording, quoted or closely paraphrased with a citation. Do not rewrite Oracle Named User Plus into “named user”.[2]
  • No row without all four: vendor URL, document title, effective date, retrieved date.
  • Commentary — how practitioners count, common failure modes, worked ELP examples — lives on encyclopedia pages and links to the metric row. It does not live in the metric definition field.

If you cannot cite a vendor document for the metric name and definition, the row does not exist yet.

Source rule

Catalog facts are vendor-docs-only.

Allowed sources: vendor price lists, license definition booklets, Product Terms, official contracts PDFs, and official policy pages.[2][3][4]

Not allowed: blogs, analyst recaps, LICENSEWARE Wiki marketing copy, unsourced tribal knowledge, Slack folklore, or “we always counted it this way.”

If the PDF does not say it, it is not a catalog fact. Interpretation belongs on the encyclopedia page, labeled as commentary, still pointing at the document the interpretation is about.

Encyclopedia page template

Every product or edition encyclopedia page uses these sections, in this order. Omit a section only when it is truly not applicable — and then say so under Out of scope, not by deleting the heading.

Section What it contains Catalog links 
Lead One paragraph: what is licensed, under which metric family, for which era. No slogans. Product, Edition 
Editions Commercial editions the vendor actually sells, and what changes between them. Edition, SKU 
Metrics Mention and link the Vendor License Metrics rows. Do not re-define the metric here; quote the vendor name and point at the row. Metric 
Counting / floors How the metric is counted, including minima, rounding, and processor or user floors. Effective date on every rule. Rule, Metric 
Virtualization & partitioning Hard/soft partition policy, clustering, and mobility as the vendor document states them. Rule 
Cloud / BYOL Bring-your-own-license onto listed clouds, authorized cloud environments, and any vCPU or core mapping the vendor publishes. Rule, Program 
Programs ULA, Enterprise Agreement, Passport Advantage, and equivalents only if sourced. No program section from memory. Program 
Out of scope What this page does not license: adjacent products, hardware, CVE, HAM, or editions not in the cited documents. — 
References Every cited document: title, URL, effective date, retrieved date. No unnamed PDFs. Source, Evidence 

Discipline and concept articles

Not every page is about one vendor’s product. Articles on the disciplines themselves (software asset management, IT asset management, software licensing) and on cross-vendor concepts (license metrics as a family, effective license position, software audits, true-ups, entitlements) follow the same encyclopedic style as Wikipedia’s articles on those subjects.

Sources allowed on these pages, in order of preference:

  1. International standards and their official summaries (ISO/IEC 19770 family on iso.org, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 publications).
  2. Government and public-sector publications (audit offices, procurement agencies, national standards bodies).
  3. Vendor documents, when the article states what a named vendor does (the Source rule above still governs every catalog fact).
  4. Peer-reviewed or academic publications and books from established publishers.

Not allowed: blogs, SAM tool vendor marketing (including LICENSEWARE), analyst recaps behind paywalls, and forum posts. Where the history or definition of a term is disputed, say so and cite both sides.

Discipline and concept articles use category: discipline or category: concept in frontmatter and this section order: Lead, History, Scope and definitions, Practice (or How it works), Standards and frameworks, Relationship to other disciplines, Criticism and challenges (when sourced), Out of scope, References.

Page layout

Encyclopedia pages use a Wikipedia-article layout. Full width is toggled in the Notion UI (the API cannot set it). Write as if the page is full width.

Order of chrome, in this sequence:

  1. Optional one-line hatnote in italic gray: This article is about …
  2. Two columns: lead (ratio 68) and infobox (ratio 32). First mention of the product or title in the lead is bold. Infobox is a compact table with fit-page-width="true", header-row="true", and header-column="true". First header cell is the article title. Rows: Publisher, Licensed as, Metrics (mention-page links to Vendor License Metrics rows), Floors, Price list as-of, Status. No emoji in the infobox. Header row uses gray_bg when markdown color attrs allow (tr color="gray_bg").
  3. Table of contents (<table_of_contents/>).
  4. Encyclopedia sections in the template order above. Body tables use fit-page-width="true" and header-row="true".
  5. Divider, then References (not “Sources”), keeping the sources table.
  6. See also with mention-page links among House rules, sibling encyclopedia pages, and other encyclopedia articles in this wiki.

Callouts are only for educational-not-contractual vendor warnings (yellow). Do not add product CTAs, WHITEPAPER10, or extra decorative callouts. Do not set a cover image; keep the existing icon.

House style

  • Write encyclopedia, not blog. No first-person war stories. No unsourced “top pitfalls” listicles.
  • Put an effective date on every rule. A rule without a date is an anecdote.
  • Page titles are plain language. No leftover markdown (**, #, backticks) in titles.
  • No product CTAs in the body. No WHITEPAPER10, no “talk to sales,” no trial prompts. The word LICENSEWARE appears only when naming this wiki.

Vendor food chain

Do not skip ahead. Coverage is built in this order so identity, SKU, metric, and rule density compound.

  1. Oracle
  2. Microsoft
  3. Broadcom / VMware
  4. IBM + SAP
  5. Adobe + Red Hat
  6. Then Salesforce, ServiceNow, Autodesk, Citrix, Cisco, Atlassian
  7. Then cloud BYOL topology — the same publishers’ software, licensed onto the hyperscaler

A later vendor is not more important. It is later because the metric and partitioning patterns from Oracle, Microsoft, and VMware are the ones later catalogs reuse.

Retrofit

Existing vendor galleries and white papers already in this wiki are archives and sources, not the product. New encyclopedia pages may cite them when those pages themselves cite vendor documents. They are not overwritten from this operating-model page.

New encyclopedia pages sit alongside the archive. If an archive page contains an unsourced claim, leave the archive intact and put the sourced version on the new encyclopedia page.

Source patterns named on this page

These are the document classes catalog rows must point at. Retrieved 2026-08-30.

References

  1. Flexera Technopedia product pageCompetitive frame, not a catalog sourceRetrieved 2026-08-30.
  2. Oracle License Definitions and Rules bookletsOracle LDR A–ZRetrieved 2026-08-30.
  3. Microsoft Product TermsProduct TermsRetrieved 2026-08-30.
  4. Oracle global pricingOfficial pricing pageRetrieved 2026-08-30.

See also

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