Supporting Electronic Commerce of Software Products Through Pay-Per-Use Downloadable Tools

Java support the development of software tools that can be downloaded on-demand by users, software tools on-demand. These tools cannot be purchased like products, because they do not reside on the user’s machine. Rather, they can be used as “services.” In this paper, we propose a new paying mechanism for Electronic Commerce of software tools-on-demand, that charges users according to how much they have used a given tool: pay-per-use rental. We discuss the benefits of pay-per-use for users and producers and we evidence the critical issues in designing a system to support pay-per-use. Then we introduce WebMetrics, our pay-per-use system that supplies software metrics collection and analysis tools–on-demand. WebMetrics integrates pay-per-use in a client/server Java application. It is based on the idea of prepaid “virtual cards” similar to rechargeable prepaid calling cards for long distance telephone calls. We conclude with a discussion on the open issues: security, reliability, availability, and standards.