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Vista Control Systems® VLS
Vista's License Management Utility

    The benefits
    What should a licensing facility have?
    What tools do you need?
    How do you implement VLS?

The benefits of controlling your customers' use of your software:

  • Increased revenue by ensuring that all use of your product is properly licensed.

  • Customers benefit: their employees and contractors won't be able to use unlicensed copies of software, with consequent possible legal implications.

What should a software licensing facility have? You will find the following features in Vista VLS:

  • The ability of the software owner to freely define the application parameters that are controlled.

  • Application parameters that can be counts as well as facilities.

  • Licenses that are plain, readable text with a checksum to protect the text.

  • License checksum algorithms that are defined by the software owner.

  • The ability to obscure the operation of the licensing within the executable, thus minimizing the possibility of hacker patching to make a license-free version.

  • The ability to load licenses either on the machine that will execute the software or on a server.

  • The ability to have redundant servers with failover.

  • License overuse protection after failover that can be customized to be paranoid or relaxed.

  • Licenses that can be node-locked, floating, time-limited, and demo, with vendor-defined usage based on vendor-defined fields, and the use of any combination of these in a single license.

  • Licenses that can be locked to Ethernet address, disk ID, CPU ID, host IP address, subnet IP address, user name, or a set of nodes defined by a logical expression that may include any of the above locks.

  • Floating licenses with the units managed by VLS. Applications can request any number of units, and VLS will recover units from applications that exit abnormally.

  • Supported platforms that include OpenVMS (VAX, ALPHA), UNIX (HP-UX, Linux, PowerMAX, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows (NT, 2000, XP).

What tools do you need to implement Vista VLS?

  • A C-language interface.

  • A rich set of API calls:

    • Simple calls for a straightforward and direct way to acquire and release licenses.

    • Many more calls to obfuscate the code.

  • Vendor-defined fields.

  • Vendor-defined keys of arbitrary length.

  • Vendor-defined application behavior in the event that the license server is unreachable.

How do you implement Vista VLS?

  1. Implement VLS API calls in your application.

  2. Integrate license generation into your business system: calls in VLS to actually generate the licenses.

  3. Include the VLS library in your distribution.

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Updated Mar 23, 2007