What is a Software Licensing System?

Licensing itself is the mechanism by which you can enforce specific license terms between your organization (more specifically your software) and your clients (the users of your software).

A software licensing system (also referred to as a "software license enforcement system") is a Software Development Kit (a set of tools for the software developer) that allows you to create, edit, compile, test, distribute, activate and support licensed software. The SoftwareShield software licensing system consists of several applications, tools, run-time components, server components and support systems to help you control and license your software.

For example, lets say you wish to create a "trial" version of your software application, where a client can install and use your software for a limited time period or number of executions, after which they must purchase the software from you or stop using the software. Since software licensing is not your development teams primary focus, if you create your own mechanism to enforce the trial version, you run the risk of creating a weak implementation. You may be hacked in short order, and a crack for your program will be available to all who wish to steal from you. Further - if you devise a "home-grown" solution, it is likely that that same solution will not meet the requirements of a different license or application.

Another possibility is a "demo" version of your software, where the demo has some significant or critical features missing, but when purchased - clients may use those features without restriction. Using the SoftwareShield software licensing system, when your client purchases your software, you can change the way the software functions without creating a new build and redistributing it. With the SoftwareShield software licensing system - you can simply provide your customer with an Activation Code that "unlocks" specific terms of your license - allowing your client to access the parts of your program they paid for. Further, the SoftwareShield System is quite secure when implemented correctly and can save you considerably in lost sales.

There are hundreds more uses for the SoftwareShield Licensing System than the simple two scenarios described above. You can implement pay-per-use, where the client prepays for usage of specific program features; periodic expiry, where the client must pay you a licensing fee every month to continue using your software; "poison-pill", where no matter what happens - the software will cease to work after a specific date - and many more combinations of license models are possible. The SoftwareShield License can hold up to 64 different Authorization Definitions which can all do completely separate tasks allowing you to effectively "remote-control" your application in hundreds of different ways with a single license - all without redistributing a single file.

The licensing features you design can be optionally hardware bound. If you choose to bind your license to hardware you will enable "Hardware Locking". This is a mechanism that essentially encodes the client computers "FingerPrint" into all Authorization Request Codes and, in-turn, the Activation Codes you remit to the client. This ensures that even if the client were to give an illegal copy of the program to someone else, along with the Activation Code you had provided for their use alone - that code would not work on the other computer. A hardware-locked Activation Code will only work on the exact computer that the client requested the code for.

Download a free trial of the SoftwareShield software licensing system.