What does license provide to the user?

[Anastasia]

Good day!

I have a difficulties to understand what does jira license provide to the user?

We deleted user from jira-users, he have lost his license, but he stayed in AD-group in Jira "jira-user-internal" and had rights to the issues by the scheme of rights which provided by the jira-users-internal group. So for what we need license?

[Joe Pitt]

. Unlike some software the license isn't tied to the user. When you buy a JIRA license it allows that NUMBER of users to be defined in a group that can logon to the application. If you have more than one group that can logon and they are defined in each they are still only counted once. By default, any new user will be placed in ALL groups with logon rights. If you don't tie permissions to the logon groups (a bad idea) and the user is still in any group that can logon they aren't impacted, which it sounds like they are.  when a user is marked as inactive they are removed from the logon groups and they don't count toward the license number. 

[Anastasia]

Hi, Joe. 

Looks like we have more than one group that can logon, but the number of license counts only for jira-users. If I create new user and then delete user from jira-users the number of used licenses reduse, but the user still can logon.

So I still can't get why users need license.