🚀 go-pugleaf

Quoting royalty@bcstec.ca.boeing.com (Chuck Royalty) from comp.software.licensing:
|I am a big proponent of license management mechanisms which allow for tailoring
|of policies.  I don't know of any public domain license managers.  But as a
|user of some products which incorporate such managers in a large scale
|environment, I would like to say that the proliferation of different types of
|license managers (different interfaces, don't work together, don't log data
|consistently, don't support similar policies the same way, etc.) is making life
|quite difficult for me.  Whenever I get the opportunity I push, not only for
|reasonable, flexible policies, but for consistency across the implementations.

Is there a "standard" for licence managers, something describing a formal
specification of the protocol, the way keys are represented, how the client
communicates with the licence manager daemon, etc...? I don't think there is,
given the variety of licence managers offered by companies.

I've heard the MIT is working on a licence manager, which I hope will be made
publicly available and become a 'de facto' standard. If every company which is
in need for a licence manager but cannot afford the ones provided by dedicated
companies start developing their own, soon there will be lots of "licence
manager daemons" running on a single network node, all with different
configuration schemes, with different logging convention, as Chuck Royalty
pointed out.

What we need is a good GNU or PD licence manager implementation. If it is to
be used by many software, great care must be taken to ensure that the
authentication protocol between a given application and the shared licence
manager is safe and that nobody can issue keys for another application,
even by running a "fake" licence manager with some hooks to dump the traffic
with a particular client.

I don't know if that is possible, given the fact that most companies which
sell licence managers recommend you to keep the source they provide well
protected and away from the man in the street (for security reasons, of course).
-- 
Raphael Manfredi <ram@eiffel.com>
Interactive Software Engineering Inc.
270 Storke Road, Suite #7                      / Tel +1 (805) 685-1006 \
Goleta, California 93117, USA                  \ Fax +1 (805) 685-6869 /