P R O D U C T
Licensing Models for CodeMeter
Do you know a butcher who is a vegetarian or a passionate car salesman who drives a model from a different brand? These are
just examples of professions where jobs tend to feel like vocations and where the affection for one’s own product is obvious
by how their makers would not use anything else themselves. Since we are fully dedicated to CodeMeter, we naturally use it
ourselves for secure licensing.
With the introduction of the new Universal
Firm Code, we now use CodeMeter License
Central Internet Edition to renew licenses for
CodeMeter.
Available Licensing Models
You can choose one of three licensing models
for CodeMeter:
■■ Standard,
■■ Pay-Per-Use, and
■■ Unlimited License.
There are also additional trial license and
protection only license options.
Standard Model
In the standard model, you pay for a license
for each CmContainer. Using the secure
CmDongle hardware means one license for
each dongle. With your Firm Code, you can
create, modify, or delete as many licenses in
that CmDongle as you wish. When using the
software-based CmActLicense, you pay for
one license for each virtual dongle. Normally,
this means creating one CmContainer per
12
machine, so the rule of thumb is: One license
per computer that stores licenses. In the case
of network servers, this would be exactly one
machine. If you want to allow your customers
to borrow licenses to a client, you need an
additional CmContainer for each client, which
you need to define and activate beforehand.
Trial Licenses and Protection Only
Licenses
Pay-Per-Use-Model
Trial licenses are needed for demo versions that
should run for a maximum period of 90 days
without activation, and only once on every
machine. These licenses can also be used to
allow the user to work with the full version of an
application without committing to it by activating
within a 90-day window (or any other period of
your choosing between 1 and 90 days).
The pay-per-use model was created specifically
with simple licenses in mind. The licenses are
rarely or never modified and only required in
small numbers. It represents a cost-efficient
entry option. You need one license for each
creation or modification of a product item. The
standard model is preferable when you need
to create as few as two different product items
or make other changes in a license’s lifecycle.
Licenses cannot be borrowed in the payper-use model, which is why most software
developers opt for the standard or unlimited
license model when they use networked
license servers.
These two additional options enable you
to create any number of licenses not bound
to specific devices. These unbound licenses
represent a type of general license, which
could be used for two typical applications:
If you only want to use the protection capabilities
of Protection Suite without CodeMeter
licensing, then you require a protection only
license. In this case, you deliver one predefined general license with your software. The
installation wizard activates it on the end user’s
system, but you keep all the protections against
reverse engineering you need.