[ale] Open-source software license manager

Jeff Lightner jlightner at water.com
Fri Jun 22 13:17:18 EDT 2007


The question made sense to me perhaps because I'm used to using
proprietary apps/DBs even on Linux.  

Luckily however, I've not had to mess with flexlm in a while.

I'd think there are probably people in the OSS space that have to use
license managers in their jobs and might have been annoyed enough with
flexlm to write something else.   The problem would be getting the
vendors to adopt an OSS "license manager".  I should think if I thought
I had to do flexlm rather than relying on honor or audits to protect my
software sales then I'd likely not be keen on a license manager that
could be modified by end users.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
To: ale at ale.org
George Carless
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 1:21 PM
To: laytonjb at charter.net; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Open-source software license manager

I think you're going to have a hard time finding what you're 
looking for, simply because the kinds of developers who're 
typically building free software are unlikely to be wanting to help 
further the cause of non-free software!

Regards,
--George

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 01:07:49PM -0400, Jeffrey B. 
Layton wrote:
> George Carless wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 10:24:40AM -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> >   
> >> On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 09:16 -0400, George Carless wrote:
> >>     
> >>> (All of this talk of license management is oddly incongruous on
ALE, btw...)
> >>>       
> >> Really?   (care to expand)
> >>     
> >
> > Well, license management typically implies restrictions on use which
are 
> > antithetical to the nature of free software, right?  I can't imagine

> > needing to "manage" GPL-licensed software in this respect, for
example.
> >   
> After I sent the email, I immediately thought, "that sounds really
> stupid." But let me explain a bit further.
> 
> I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with flexlm, a license manager
> that is used in a lot of ISV codes (typically engineer or scientific
> codes). Flexlm is a real pain in the butt to work with. I've had
> this tolerate-hate relationship with it from sometime.
> 
> So what I'm looking for is an open-source license manager that
> these ISV's can use in their closed code. (It does seem kind of
> strange, doesn't it?). The idea would be for ISV's to use this open
> source license manager in their proprietary codes. Since it's open
> source, we can identify and fix bugs rather then rely on a third
> party closed code where the owner isn't too concerned about
> improvements/bug fixes and the like - just making money (I can't
> fault them for wanting to keep their product and company alive
> but I am faulting them for having a crappy product and not responding
> to customers).
> 
> Does this explanation help? I know it still sounds weird though.
> 
> Jeff
> 
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> 

-- 
--------------------------------------
George Carless ... kafka at antichri.st
Words are just dust in deserts of sound
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