We often talk with clients in the industry who want to distribute network licenses for their software, and ask us, "How do we offer the best flexibility to our users, while still making sure our software is secure against illegal use?" In the old days, that would have been a hard question to answer. Today, with new emerging technologies such as virtual machines, it's become much easier.
Let me explain: Many companies in the 1990's liked using dongles due to their flexibility and their ability to be moved from one machine to another. The downside of this was that they were expensive and cumbersome to deal with, because they could easily be broken or lost.
With the emergence of inexpensive networking equipment, the modern environment now consists of a larger infrastructure that lets users connect to the corporate network while still being able to disconnect and do things offline. When it comes to license models, this represents very well the reasoning behind both node-locked and floating licensing.
In early 2000, I personally swore that I would never need a laptop, because everything I ever needed to do could easily be done on a standalone machine. Guess what... I'm writing this message from a laptop today. People like me who are always on the run need flexibility. When it comes to software licenses, you want them to work for you, not against you. That's why license models such as floating and borrowed licenses have made a huge impact on how people buy and use commercial software today.
Another technological breakthrough that changes how we look at licensing is virtual machines, which offer the needed advancements on the server and back-end infrastructure. We see more and more interest in virtual environments, because this sparks the same progress in computing as the advent of the network did back in the 90's. Already, even smaller companies like X-Formation couldn't be performing the operations we do without virtual machines. One of our machines runs with 10 virtual machines concurrently to perform only some of our testing. Without tools like VMware, our hardware costs would be multiplied many times to perform the same operations.
The idea here is that software must adapt to the modern environment, which is also the reason we invented virtual machine licensing. Virtual machine licensing is disabled in LM-X by default; otherwise, users can easily duplicate their number of licenses in a matter of minutes by using virtual machines.
However, if you combine a virtual machine license with hostid locking for dongles, you get the best of both worlds. In addition to getting the floating and borrowed license capabilities that our customers typically request, you also get a solid hostid locking mechanism that doesn't depend on virtual hardware devices. Thus, copying of virtual machines becomes irrelevant, because you won't be able to start more than one instance of the software anyway.
In such a setup, a dongle connected to a server is easier to manage. Servers are typically isolated and seldom moved around, so risks of stolen or lost dongles are minimal compared with single-user licenses. In addition, costs for a single dongle are minimal compared with node-locked usage, which makes it possible to incorporate dongle usage into contracts when people are signing up for greater numbers of licenses.
If you would like to hear more about potential license models,
contact us today, and we'll be happy to discuss your specific requirements.
