Perpetual Licensing
IBM's traditional one-time-purchase IBM i licensing model, paid once per core rather than annually.
Perpetual licenses carry a higher up-front cost than a single year of subscription pricing but no further core-license fee as long as the software maintenance agreement (SWMA) is kept current. Whether perpetual or subscription is cheaper depends entirely on your expected hold period -- factor this into any upgrade-economics decision.
Related Terms
Subscription Licensing
IBM's pay-per-year IBM i licensing model, billed per core per year, introduced as an alternative to perpetual (one-time) licensing.
SWMA
Software Maintenance Agreement, the ongoing annual fee that keeps a perpetual IBM i license entitled to fixes, updates, and new releases.
IBM i Software Tier
IBM's per-core licensing bracket for IBM i (P05, P10, P20, P30, P50) that sets your annual or perpetual software cost based on processor feature code, independent of the Power generation running underneath it.