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Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:37:07 -0700
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From: David Brodbeck <gull@gull.us>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
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Subject: Re: Turning system accounting data into money
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On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Christopher J. Ruwe <cjr@cruwe.de> wrote:
> So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time.

Yeah, this was the normal way of doing things for many years on
"large" systems, back when a "large system" was a multiuser UNIX box
the size of a refrigerator.  For a long time it went away, as computer
time got "too cheap to meter," so a lot of the accounting tools that
exist in UNIX are a bit foreign to modern admins.

We're seeing a bit of a resurgence of the pay-for-usage model with
services like Amazon EC2.