UPenn Software Licensing

Penn's Office of Software Licensing

The Office of Software Licensing (OSL) was formed in 1997 to negotiate and administer software site licenses and volume discount purchases, and to distribute licenses and software for those products. Departments, faculty, and staff can purchase this software from OSL at significant savings. Departments renew the software fee annually with OSL using their Penn departmental budget code.

While terms vary from vendor to vendor, most licenses must be used for University-related academic or administrative purposes, or academic research on University-owned computers, and a license is needed for each computer running the software. Other specific terms and conditions appear in the product descriptions on this site.

By aggregating the demand for software from all schools and administrative centers at Penn, OSL maintains the University's eligibility for exceptional pricing.

New Software Licensing Portal: OSL has launched a new software licensing portal to process departmental licensing orders. We've developed this new portal in consultation with Penn’s Common Solutions Group, as well as other user across campus.

The new ordering site offers a number of benefits, including:

  • a familiar shopping cart experience
  • online EULA acceptance 
  • online fulfillment of orders 
  • proxy order functionality that allows someone else to receive fulfillment
  • with an eye towards creating a "One Stop Shop" environment, the site can expand to accommodate many of the licenses being used throughout Penn

Note that payment continues to be via BEN account numbers, and the BA approval process has not changed at all.

Listed below are the software titles currently available through the new licensing portal:

Software Managed by OSL: The following site licenses are managed by OSL and available for purchase on the new licensing portal - ArcGIS, FastX, JMP, Mathematica, MATLAB, Qualtrics, SAS, and SPSS.  It also manages two volume discount licenses - IDL and InCommon SSL Certifcates.

Software Managed by our Preferred Software Vendor (SHI): Several licenses traditionally managed by OSL will now be sold by SHI, through the new licensing portal via the BEN Marketplace - FileMaker, Ghost, Identity Finder and Uniprint.