It had to change at some point in time. I've watched technology advance over the last few years, with dual core, quad core, and even up to twelve core processors appearing from Intel and AMD. With those advances, one of the huge advantages of choosing SQL Server over other RDBMS's is that SQL Server has been licensed by physical socket rather than core licensing, and for less cost, we have been getting more and more processing power for our CPU licenses. However with SQL Server 2012 being released next year sometime, that is due to change. Microsoft released initial licensing information and Denny Cherry (blog | @MrDenny) wrote a great post that helps explain how the licensing will be handled moving forward.

Read the rest of "License by Core" at SQLServerCentral.