Licensing for Ontolica 2010 is simple, with only a few parameters which scale according to your usage. This article explains how the product is licensed and which aspects of your farm are used to determine which licensing scenario is appropriate for you.
There are two parameters relevant for Ontolica licensing. These are user count and the active WFE count.
User Counts
Ontolica counts users by their Active Directory authentication each time they perform a search, permitting access by a number of users up to the total number permitted by the active license. When a user accesses an Ontolica search center or web-part that user is added to a list. 90 days after their last search that user is removed from the list again, freeing that slot up for another user.
The Anonymous user which is used to monitor access from the internet is a special case. If the internet connector for Ontolica has been enabled on a license, then any number of users can access the search, as long as they are all the Anonymous user account.
You can have both a specific number of named users, as well as Anonymous users on a single account.
Active Web Front End Servers
Ontolica is a fully load-balanced application. This allows it to scale with your infrastructure and meet your needs for performance and responsiveness in the same way you expect of your other SharePoint applications. This means that all of the Web Front End Server availlable in the farm will be availlble for use by Ontolica, as controlled by the SharePoint load balancer.Specifically, these are servers running the "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application" service.
This approach ensures the best possible performance within your infrastructure.
For this reason, Ontolica requires a license for each of the active Web Front End servers in your farm.
It is important to keep in mind that control of where an application is executed within the pool of availlable WFE servers is controlled entirely by SharePoint. It is not possible to throttle Ontolica back to operate only on specific WFEs, or on a reduced count of WFEs within the farm.
If you have questions about the specifics of your licensing scenario, or would like to check the number of active web front ends, we have written an application to return a farm report, which contains the SharePoint Farm ID, as well as the active number of Web Front Ends.
You can download the tool here.