Unrestricted License Models

A while ago, we wrote a blog post titled 101 license models.  In this post, we will explore the first set of license models described in that post – the Unrestricted License Models.  To review, the Unrestricted License Models we talked about are these:

• any
• customer name
• demo
• expiring
• license type (beta, demo, eval)
• maintenance-thru-date
• options
• permanent
• serial number
• software version
• user-locked

These licenses are not locked to any machine or license server.  In other words, they work anywhere.  So, given that a customer can use as many of these licenses as they want, why would you ever want to use one of these?

One reason may be that you want to restrict how a license is used, as opposed to how many copies of that license can be used.  At Reprise, we license RLM to an ISV, but we do not restrict how many develpers can use the development kit, nor do we restrict how many copies of their application that can be used.   We do this by using an unrestricted license model – we lock the RLM license to the ISV’s short name (what we call the ISV name).  Once “out in the world”, a customer can only have software from one ISV of a particular name, so multiple companies would not use the same ISV name to license their software.  This provides sufficient licensing protection for our software.  A customer who has purchased an RLM license would get a permanent license with this ISV name, whereas a demo customer would get an expiring license with an ISV name of “demo”.

Another Reprise product that is licensed in this way is our Activation Pro product.  This is a server-based product, and the real value comes from having a single server that activates the licenses for an ISV’s customer, but we allow our ISVs to run multiple copies of this server, primarily so that they can do testing on a second installation.

Similarily, a product could display a customer’s name in a splash-screen.  Most legitimate businesses would not want another company using software that was licensed to them by name.

Frequently, our customers use user-locked licenses, which are locked to an operating system’s notion of the user name.  While it is possible to have multiple humans logged in as the same user name, this becomes inconvenient.

Also, ISVs might license their main program using floating or node-locked lienses, while some ancillary program or utility uses one of these unrestricted license models so that there is some amount of control, but provides convenience to their customers.

We will explore the other main License Model categories in future blog posts.