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I sell a niche desktop application to engineering companies. They self-police themselves pretty well - we're really not concerned with them cracking our softwa
by etwigg 9y ago
I sell a niche desktop application to engineering companies. They self-police themselves pretty well - we're really not concerned with them cracking our software at all.
We built our own stupid-simple licensing system. True, it wasn't that hard, but it would totally be worth $100/mo to have this maintained by somebody else, so we could focus only on our product.
Their competition (FlexLM, etc) is horrific. This looks much better.
- gfody 9y agoFlexLM is horrific and does terrible things like stashing data in unused/unformatted areas of your disk as well as dropping litter all over the registry and filesystem. I have to use Tableau which I actually really like but because it uses FlexLM that shit will never touch my bare metal.. VM only.
- dfox 9y agoThe part that does this is not FlexLM itself, but safecast with which it is frequently bundled, but many specialized engineering products use only FlexLM without additional DRM layer (FlexLM itself is originally meant for Unix and mostly portable, Safecast is probably Windows-only). On the other hand many things use FlexLM only to provide node-locking which is thing that it can do, but is to some extent an afterthought. The thing was originally designed to be used over network to provide floating licensing, with some minimal resistance to cheating and cracking. In fact it seems that it's original author(s) (wikipedia says that the whole "team", but it mostly looks like one guy) got fed up with managment and marketing so much that he went on to implement and sell RLM on their own, which mostly seems like slightly better FlexLM without completely nonsensical features.