🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <138@eiffel.eiffel.com> ram@eiffel.com (Raphael Manfredi) writes:
>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.

And I'm cynical enough to believe there isn't likely to be any standard, at
least for a while.  The market at present seems to consist of a several
license manager developers, each pushing his own proprietary product;
they don't want standards because their only competitive advantage is
in being different from all the rest.  Seems to me this isn't likely to
change unless some Really Big Player (e.g. Microsoft or IBM) adopts
a license manager protocol and makes it more affordable for software
developers (and end users) than any of the competing alternatives.
>
>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.
>
Yeah, but I wonder if the market has run so far ahead of MIT/gnu/etc.
that there won't be any momentum to whatever they do come up with.
-- 
haynes@cats.ucsc.edu
haynes@cats.bitnet

"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art."
        Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle