I'd recommend to work out what field you're selling to, and consider if you can follow what the major vendors are using in that field. Your customers' sysadmin

I'd recommend to work out what field you're selling to, and consider if you can follow what the major vendors are using in that field. Your customers' sysadmins are probably already dealing with a bunch of commercial software, more dominant than yours. Go with the flow and lower the workload for everyone. Seems simple to implement your own; you also get security through some degree of being less mainstream. But don't underestimate the variety out in the field or the amount of hardening that existing solutions have had. In our case, I've never experienced a vendor's 'home brew' solution actually work properly when faced with the load of a renderfarm or HPC cluster (normal for customers like us) without several revisions. Hardly unsolvable problems, but then a dialogue back and forth is needed to fix such issues; wasted time for both parties, unless you are in the business of developing licensing servers. Obviously there's a balance here with how much it costs to bring in a tried and tested solution (flexlm and rlm are the ones I know of) vs cost of the other options.