Our non-Flex protected product currently supports transferrable licenses. That is to say, a user inserts a USB key (or floppy) at the destination machine and 'preps' the key, walks it over to the entitled machine and uploads the entilement onto the USB key, and finally the USB key is walked back to the original machine and that machine becomes the new entitled machine.
The idea is that the user can transfer a license from an old machine to a new one without requiring 're-hosting' (i.e. contacting us), and this method ensures that the license cannot be duplicated onto many other machines.
Is anything like this possible with Flex? The documentation seems to indicate that these are my only options:
# Node-locked to a laptop # Node-locked to a FLEXid (Windows only) # Node-locked to a FLEXid with FLOAT_OK keyword (Windows only) # License borrowing with BORROW keyword # Node-locked to a user name # Fulfilled from a prepaid license pool
There's nothing built in that's exactly like that.
With trusted storage, you can use so-called activatable licenses, where a license server at the end-user site initially hosts the license, and a client can detach the license while it's needed, and later return the license to the internal server to be detached by a different system. The server would initially be "charged up" using an Operations-style request-response process.
Trusted storage-based borrowing is a variation of this, where the "detachments" have a time limit, after which the license becomes unavailable on the client and reappears at the internal server.
And as you say, one more option is to lock the license to a USB dongle.
I'd like to explore this further. If I understand this correctly, the way to support permanent license transfers is by hosting the license in server-trusted storage on machine #1, and using response/request activation to transfer the license to machine #2.
What exactly locks the license to machine #1, that is transferred to machine #2? Obviously it can't be a node-locked HOSTID in the entitlement FEATUREs lines.
For "activatable" licenses, the license is detached and deducted from the server's trusted storage and placed in the client's application trusted storage. The binding and anchoring features of each client's trusted storage are what prevent it from being copied or transferred to another system.
