Restricting Usage: Nodelocked Licenses
A while ago, we wrote a blog post titled 101 license models, and a followup on unrestricted license models. In this post, we explore the second set of license models described in that post – Nodelocked Licenses. To review, the Nodelocked Licenses we described are:
- uncounted
- computing environment limited
- customer name
- detached demo
- expiring
- single
- license type (beta, demo, eval)
- maintenance-thru-date
- options
- permanent
- platform-limited
- software version
- timezone-limited
- upgrade other licenses
- user-locked
- VM enabled
Because these licenses are locked to a machine or user, they are more restrictive than the previously-described unrestricted license models.
You use nodelocked licenses when you want to restrict how and where your software is used. Since nodelocked licenses do not require a license server, your customer is up and running with a minimum of fuss.
What you can do with Nodelocked Licenses
With nodelocked licenses, you have quite a bit of flexibility – you can:
- allow any user running your software on the nodelocked machine access,
- allow only a single copy of your software to run on the (specified) machine,
- provide an expiration and/or a start date for the license,
- create options so that you have an opportunity to upsell to your customers,
- specify that the license is not usable on a virtual machine,
- include the customer name, for use in a startup screen. This often deters software theft.
Sometimes our customers use user-locked licenses, which are locked to an operating system’s notion of the user name rather than the computer’s hostid. While it is possible to have multiple humans logged in as the same user name, this can be inconvenient for certain applications.
In addition to all these options, you can also upgrade a license to a newer version when a customer stays on maintenance.
We will explore the other main License Model categories in future blog posts.