Licensing my program
Hi, i’m developing a Point Of Sale software and would like to find out possible solutions to manage licensing my program. I have tried a couple of tutorials from YouTube but found little free solutions to my problem.
I would like to emphasise that there are two programs i offer: POS and BackOffice. Licensing every POS machine would be problematic (if somebody had 20 registers or so) so i thought that licensing only back office software (which is usually on one pc) would be enough. What do u think?
6 Replies
It's not only about the technical solution, but monetary
What is your customer base? Companies? What sizes? Small to large? Wouldn't it be a shame to sell your software to a large customer and get paid the same amount as from a smaller one?
Why would licensing each machine be problematic?
My company is using renevera flexnet, which is a commercial solution
Honestly it’s a small project, along with short budget i have to go for a free solution
Why is this an issue?
It can be as simple as storing license keys in a database, exposing them via an API, and having the software ping home every now and then to check if the key is valid
entering manually a license key each time it expires might be an ick
that’s a great notion, thanks a lot
don't mix up Authentication and Authorization ('Licensing'). Authentication - some value that machines provide to prove who they are or who owns them. You might give any 'client' a single set of ClientId and ClientSecret that all of their machines are expected to use. If that secret has to change, the Id doesn't, which is important because Authorization is in your internal system, indicating that this client ID has paid for access to this service for this much time
The point is that no matter what happens to their licensing, if it expires or etc, they shouldn't have to change how their machines authenticate - and any change to how they authenticate shouldn't affect their subscription or license, such as if they change their Secret (which they should be able to do freely)
Businesses might not like the idea of a single shared secret across all their machines though, I'm not sure the best way to handle that, but my point is just to keep the two concepts separated so you can independently figure out how to handle Licensing vs what credentials a machine should provide