OK. Harken back to 1988.  You are an ISV selling high-value desktop and/or workstation class software to your scientific and engineering customer base. You need to "lock" your software so that it can't be shared with others.  If even a single unlicensed copy is used, you'll take a serious revenue hit.  What to do?

Dongles provide serial number to lock licenses
Along comes the dongle.  Well, it wasn't originally called a dongle. It was a "hardware key" or "security key" or "security block", and many other names including product names like hasp. In any case, the dongle, as it is now commonly known, was a solution to the software locking problem. It was a primitive physical device consisting of some simple electronics that, when queried through software, returned a factory-preset serial number to which a software product could be tied. This was a boon to software developers who at the time were experimenting with using, of all things, floppy disks as keys.

Weaknesses soon found
But, as soon as the use of dongles became more widespread, inherent problems surfaced.  Early dongles used parallel printer ports of the PC.  Dongles were designed to allow printers to connect pass-thru style, but since these ports often had non-standard electrical characteristics including power problems, dongles sometimes failed in the field.

Hmm?  Failed dongle == failed software.  Not good.  So, ISVs kept FedEx and UPS busy, sending overnight dongle replacements - the cost of the overnight trip exceeded the cost of the dongle. Other problems surfaced too: dongles were lost or stolen, users failed to install updated software drivers to keep up with OS revisions, the dreaded dongle-snake appeared (so many dongles chained together that they literally fell off the PC), etc.

Along comes PC networking
But, the biggest factor in the dongle's demise was the arrival of PC networking.  Once networks became popular, software could be tied to the hardware address of the ethernet communication card. Licenses began to be shared over the network as software license managers (like RLM) exploited the power of interconnected users to allow even casual users access to valuable software licenses.

Dongles still solve license mobility problem
So, dongles waned in popularity as a general solution for licensing software, but remained popular in some products including laboratory, testing, and retail software applications. The principal reason was that serialized dongles still provided a viable way to securely move your software from one machine to another. For example, imagine you were an architect working with sophisticated design software at your office. You could grab the dongle and head home, install it on your home computer and use the same software there without having to buy a second expensive license.

Today, dongles are much cheaper, more reliable and are usually connect via USB ports - making them easy to attach to a modern PC.

Today's floating license management and dongles
Floating licensing provides a mechanism for licenses to be shared among networked users. The whole license pool can be locked to a single server using either the server's host ID or a dongle acting as a proxy for the server's ID. In this way the license manager

encodes the dongle's serial number as part of the pool of licenses that it serves. By using advanced functionality in license managers, like the concept of "roaming" in the Reprise License Manager, that same architect mentioned above can disconnect his laptop, and take his licensed software on the road temporarily while the licenses appear to be "in use" back at the office. When he returns to the office, his license is put back into the pool for all users to share once again.

Supporting dongles with the Reprise License Manager
ISVs who want to support dongles with RLM can do so by way of a ISV-defined host ID.  ISVs can choose a simple dongle because RLM needs only the dongle's serial number at runtime. ISVs write a simple routine to retrieve the dongle's ID and register that routine with RLM so that whenever a license is found to be tied to the dongle, RLM knows to call the ISV's routine to obtain the dongle serial number.

Next month - The pros and cons of system fingerprinting.
 

Vico Software, a Reprise License Manager (RLM) customer since September 2006, develops and sells software solutions for the construction industry, a market that has been known for its sub-optimum use of materials, low efficiency, and late and over-budget projects.

Vico Software's business is focused on trying to make the construction industry more efficient through the integration of design, construction and management processes, thus improving project predictability; providing early identification of constructability problems; and synchronizing design, costs and schedules. With over two hundred customers and more than one hundred and fifty projects completed, Vico Software has a proven track record of delivering results towards these objectives in several international markets, primarily in the US, UK, Nordic (mostly Finland) and the Middle East. 



Before adopting RLM, Vico Software used dongles (hardware keys) to license its products.  Although dongles served their needs well for several years, the advanced licensing demands of their customers (especially those from their largest and best customers) began to surpass the dongle's ability to support them. So, Vico Software began to look for a replacement licensing technology that provided a more flexible software licensing platform without the use of dongles.

After a comprehensive evaluation process, Vico Software selected the Reprise License Manager. In addition to the advanced technology within RLM, including license roaming (a critical feature for Vico's marketplace), what impressed Vico was Reprise Software's quick support turnaround time and its responsiveness to requests for additional features.

Vico Software sells both dedicated (standalone) and floating licenses with a perpetual and/or subscription pricing model.

To learn more about Vico Software, please click here.

For Developers:
 

• New activity flag (for automatic heartbeats) - to tell server when application is idle - to timeout licenses

• Advanced "named user" license type - enforces user-include list prevents re-enrollment of user for X hours

• Transition guide from older LM systems

• RLM can verify licenses against any ethernet addresses on Mac, and Linux

• RLM tries to checkout roamed license if all other checkouts fail

• New API call - rlm_license_exp_days() - returns how many days until license expires

• Detect Solaris containers on x64 - to prevent multiple copies of the license server from running on the same system
   

Internet Activation:
 

• Ability to upload arbitrary license fields to activation server through rlm_act_request() activation api call - (e.g. customer, contract info)

• Allow issued=today during activation

 
For Administrators:
 

• New rlm options file to limit access to "stat/shutdown/reread/edit" functions

• Use -c option to rlmutil to override RLM_LICENSE env variable

• Allow editing of options files from web admin interface

• Web admin interface displays last 20 lines of debug log

• Web admin interface shows which licenses are roaming

• Include seconds, milliseconds on denials in report log

• Report Log Anonymizer - utility to remove private (user/host) names from report log

• Auto rotation of report logs (daily, weekly, monthly , or n-days ROTATE in options file)

If you would like to evaluate RLM or beta test v4.0 RLM, please click here.