A software license manager is a software management tool used by

independent software vendor An independent software vendor (ISV), also known as a software publisher, is an organization specializing in making and selling software, in contrast to computer hardware, designed for mass or niche markets. This is in contrast to in-house softwa ...

s or by end-user organizations to control where and how software products are able to run. License managers protect software vendors from losses due to

software piracy Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission, such as music, movies or software. History Nathan Fisk traces the origins of modern online piracy back to similar ...

and enable end-user organizations to comply with

software license A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell lic ...

agreements. License managers enable software vendors to offer a wide range of usage-centric software licensing models, such as

product activation Product activation is a license validation procedure required by some proprietary software programs. Product activation prevents unlimited free use of copied or replicated software. Unactivated software refuses to fully function until it ''determi ...

, trial licenses, subscription licenses, feature-based licenses, and floating licensing from the same software package they provide to all users. A license manager is different from a software asset management tool, which end-user organizations employ to manage the software they have licensed from many software vendors. However, some software asset management tools include license manager functions. These are used to reconcile software licenses and installed software, and generally include device discovery, software inventory, license compliance, and reporting functions. An additional benefit of these software management tools are that they reduce the difficulty, cost, and time required for reporting and can increase operational transparency in order to prevent litigation costs associated with software misuse, as set forth by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. License management solutions provided by non-vendor companies are more valuable to the end-users, since most vendors do not provide enough license usage information. A vendor license manager provides limited information, while non-vendor license management solutions are developed for end-users in order to maximally optimize the licenses they have. Most license managers can cover different software licensing models as license dongles or license USB keys, floating licenses, network licenses, concurrent license etc.

References

External links

Floating License Management

Licensing Library, License Manager Web-App

Cloud Software Licensing

OpenLM Software License Management

Licensing over DNSSEC, License Manager Web-App
{{Software distribution System administration

Manager Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a government bodies through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administra ...