Floating Licensing Solution
Traditionally, a software license is bound or linked to a particular individual user or person and / or a particular computer or machine on which the software can be used.
However the industry has evolved rapidly in the past decade, and the ways in which software can be distributed, used and consumed have grown in number and nature. There are now many scenarios where binding a license to a user or machine is neither possible nor desired. Instead, a “floating” license is needed, that is not tied to a single entity and can be used by more than one machine / user during its lifetime.
Typical floating / concurrent licensing scenarios include the following:
- Where it's not practical or cost effective to install licenses on each instance (e.g. large installations)
- Where the no. of installed instances intentionally exceed the no. of available licenses (e.g. shift work etc.)
- Where the number of instances vary over time based on demand etc. (e.g. web farms / cloud apps etc.)
- Virtualized environments where secure license storage is not feasible
Floating Licensing Solution from Software Potential
Software Potential's floating license service supports any of the above scenarios with the further benefit of central license administration.
Floating Licensing is implemented via a locally installed component called the "License Distributor" which introduces the concept of software license leasing, whereby a license can be checked out or leased for a period of time, and then checked back in when the usage period expires.
The client application requests licenses from the license distributor, which in turn serves a group of client application instances. The license distributor connects to the Software Potential service at set-up to activate the floating licensing service, however all subsequent activity can occur between the app and distributor.
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