Telephone house for license verification is considered evil

Question

Assigning home to force the use of a user license is considered by many to be "evil." But for my web-dependent Windows application, this seems like the perfect way to provide a single-user license with multiple workstations, that is, one license on many machines, but only one can be active at a time. As an example, consider one license for a rendering engine with a workflow spanning several hours that is only active on one machine.

Thus, the licensing server must authenticate the application when it is first launched and verify that the license is not used before the workflow begins. I see how this will be considered evil if the application requires Internet access only to verify its license, but my application is useless without an Internet connection. A site license will require only one check.

If the licensing server never works (I hope almost never), the application should gracefully degrade to a limited version until it is authenticated. He should call home to check for updates and report (consensual) usage statistics anyway, so why is it so bad?

How to keep honest people honest without being evil?

Answer 1

Trust your customers to pay the bill. If they want to run your program on two computers at the same time, they will find a way.

Make it easy for users to use the software. Often the pirated version of the program is more convenient for the user than the legal one. On the one hand, the pirated version simply continues to work if the license server does not work.

I advise you to give the user full access if the license server is down, instead of giving them a limited version.

Answer 2

This, like all rights management, comes down to risk. If you trust that your users will usually adhere to your licensing conditions or at least be close to them (sometimes two instances are launched), you do not need an extreme approach to requesting a license server with each run.

If you do not trust your users, how much additional income, in your opinion, will you achieve and will it exceed the cost of implementing and supporting your licensing solution? Keep in mind that the more you restrict, the greater the likelihood that someone will violate your restrictions and pay you nothing (this is my impression based on nothing more than experience).

For one, I would be furious if my paid application worsened in performance just because your licensing server was omitted, which is your problem, not mine :)

Answer 3

Make it easier to be honest than to be dishonest. As soon as the pirated version comes out without cripples, you only punish honest people.

Answer 4

As an (almost) average computer user, this would seem fair enough to me, except for one point. If your licensing server is down, my experience should not be affected. The application should continue to work as a full version until it can be authenticated correctly. In the end, the end user should not suffer for your technical problems.

Gary