RLM Technology Review

RLM Case Study - T-Splines

The Reprise License Manager (RLM) was created by a team with significant experience with software license management.  So whether you're new to using a commercial license manager or very familiar and looking for a change, RLM has what you need.

The Basics
For your application to use RLM, simply add RLM's C language API calls to your source code.  Compile and link with the RLM libraries, create customer licenses with the license creation tool rlmsign, test and package the RLM servers (one generic and one specific to you as a software vendor, used if you're doing network licensing) and you're done.
 
Some Details
RLM utilizes a "policy in the license" approach, which means that you only need do the work to put RLM calls into your application once to cover all the different ways you can license your software.  This way, your engineers need not go back and change the RLM implementation because marketing or sales wants to sell your products differently (for example, on a network-user basis instead of locked to one machine, or on an annual basis instead of a license that's good forever.)  The implication of "policy in the license" is that your binary will take on the behavior as described in the license.  So the person(s) in your company that issue licenses to customers will be the people responsible for ensuring that the licenses that get created match the marketing/ sales model for your products.
 
License Types
With RLM there are several different ways to license your products. All of them in one way or another "tie" or "lock" a text-based license file that describes the customer's license rights to either a specific machine or one machine on a network, which then serves out those rights to the various potential users in your customer's organization.

Besides being locked to one machine or floating on a network, licenses can have an expiration date or be perpetual.  Product version numbers can be enforced via licensing, as can maintenance or support contracts via a product release date-based version number.
 
Additional attributes can be used, such as a "hold time" for products with a short run time; license start date; maximum number of days the product can "roam", or remain licensed while disconnected from the customer network; the platform(s) on which the licensed product can be run (ie., Linux, Mac OSX, Windows); the time zone(s) in which the licensed product can be run and a list of other products that are checked out at the same time as part of an RLM "token-based" license.
 
End User Experience
Obviously, using RLM can impact how your end users interact with your product.  For this reason, the RLM implementation and end user guides (available as part of an RLM evaluation kit) describe some "best practice" guidelines drawn from our decades of experience with software license management.  In the best case, by using RLM in your applications your customers might realize that they have under-bought product licenses and come to you for more.  And "going live" with software licensing will provide very direct feedback as to the testing you put your RLM-licensed product through.  Hopefully, by following the recommended bast practices your support burden will be minimal.
 
"Licensing" vs. "Security"
Finally, a word on what software licensing is and isn't.  We created RLM to keep "honest users honest."  Typical corporate IT organizations want to abide by vendors' license agreements, but only if they have an easy way to do so.  Putting in RLM will keep your users from accidentally over-using your software.  Or, it will allow them to knowingly over-use your software and keep a record of the amount of over-usage for later billing.  We call this approach "software licensing" and try to make it clear that "security" is a different notion.

When it comes to hacking, piracy or outright theft, nothing will stop the determined thief.  That's not to say that RLM can be easily overcome, but no amount of technology will stop someone who's truly motivated to steal.  In this day and age, software vendors are most concerned about making their software easy to use and easy to buy by those who are willing to spend money.  Adding RLM helps enable those easy purchases by making the user aware of how much they have and making them aware should they start to over-use your RLM-licensed products.
 
For software vendors that are less concerned about ease of use and more concerned about stopping actual piracy, we've partnered with Arxan and VI Labs in the anti-tamper, binary hardening and anti- reverse-engineering space.  A product licensed by RLM and including anti-tamper technology from the above vendors will do more to help stop outright theft.