Do You Really Need a License Manager?  Or can you use an Activation Server as a License Manager?

In certain circumstances, you could use an Activation Server as a license manager.

This would be the case for very simple, straightforward node-locked licensing.  For example, an app that runs on a phone or a tablet (or a simple application that runs on the desktop).   Instead of integrating a license manager, you add a call to activate the license, and the activation server performs the initial activation on the first request, and verifies that the license is activated on subsequent requests.

Advantages:

• You avoid the cost of a license manager.
• The code is easier to integrate
• The software footprint in your code is smaller

Disadvantages:

• Your application must contact the activation server on every invocation.
• The licensing models supported are quite simple – nodelocked, uncounted only

How would this work?

Let’s put aside the issue of how the activation keys are created in the first place.  There are a variety of ways this is accomplished, depending on your business rules.

When your application runs, you do the following:

• determine some unique charactistic of the device or computer.   If it is a phone, this might be as simple as the phone number or the device’s ethernet MAC address.
• your software presents the activation key and the device id to the activation server and receive the status:
  • Not Activated previously -> the server records the device ID, and returns a success status.
  • Activated previously from this device -> the server returns a success status.
  • If the key was activated from another device, the status would be “key already used”.

It’s really as simple as that.  There is a single web services call to perform the initial activation and checks status later.