


This means increased revenue by preventing casual piracy. The biggest benefit of using hardware-locked licensing is that you (the company) have absolute control over how many times a customer installs your software. Hardware-locked licensing is the best type of software protection for 99% of all software. Hardware-locked licensing (online activation, USB dongles, etc.) You will lose a considerable amount of revenue using “serial-only” licensing.ī. But the principle behind all of these variations remains the same: the license (whether it's a product key or a file) can be shared over-and-over again.įor almost every case we recommend avoiding “serial only licensing” - use hardware-locked licensing instead (see the next section).Īdvantages of serial-only licensing: It's exceedingly simple to build in-house.ĭisadvantages of serial-only licensing: You have absolutely no control over how many times a company/user uses your software. One such variation is asymmetrically encrypting a large block of data and including this encrypted data in a license file for the user.

There are some variations of serial-only licensing. A user or company can use the product key over and over again and there's nothing you can do about it. product key only licensing) is where you have a product key like “ABCD-EFGH-IJKL-MNOP-…” and that's it. Hardware-locked licensing (online activation, USB dongles, floating licenses, etc.).The types of licensing fall into 3 general groups: There is real money to be made by stopping casual piracy. The point of licensing is to increase your revenue by preventing casual piracy (using serials over and over again). The point of licensing isn't to stop crackers from cracking your software. With few exceptions the “hardware-locked” licensing is best for businesses because it allows you to have absolute control over where your software is installed. The types of software licensing come in a few general forms which I'll be covering in the next section. Software licensing allows you to get paid for each copy of your software. Finally, I'll cover why LimeLM is the best hardware-locked licensing solution on the market by showing how it works and what we do to uniquely solve your licensing problems. This article is going to explain what software licensing is, the types of licensing, and why the “hardware-locked” type of licensing will earn you the most money. What is hardware-locked licensing and why choose LimeLM? Licensing from inside a virtual machine or hypervisor.Licensing multiple products per process.How to generate product keys after an order.Basics for TurboFloat (floating licenses).Adding users to manage your LimeLM account.How to switch your licensing to LimeLM, TurboActivate, and TurboFloat.How hardware-locked licensing and online activation works.
