Hello,
I am looking for a solution that allows me to easily generate licenses that users can then check-in and check-out on their computers. I am currently working with a dongle-based license lock solution, but it is not flexible enough.
The best would be if I could install a license management system on my website, so that I am not dependent on the success/failure of some company that provides this service.
Would you happen to know such a system?
Thanks for any input
You're entering a much-hated, easily-cracked, and very expensive area of software.
There is one company that is well known, widely hated by consumers, and used by many businesses: FlexNet, formerly FlexLM, handles it.
As you write that you want to be "not dependent on the success/failure of some company that provides this service", the most viable alternative is to have an always-connected model for software as a service, often called SaaS. In that model you build your software so that the customer must be connected to the server for it to work. If they aren't connected, it doesn't work. Web sites are a common example to this, where the person must have a valid account on the server, fully paid up and authorized, in order to log in. Anything fails, such as their account expiring or being logged in outside an IP range or having an IP address from a restricted country, etc, then the server denies access.
Paid multiplayer online games are another easy example. World of Warcraft works as long as you've got your subscription paid, but when your account stops the service stops as well. You don't need a dongle, although they work with RSA to build security tokens to help secure your account for people who are interested in that.
With SaaS you are only dependent on your hosting company and their service levels, plus your own code and its bugs. (Or whatever authentication and licensing code you license, which you don't want to because then you would be dependent on them.)
