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, as opposed to computer hardware, designed for mass or niche markets. This is in contrast to in-house software, ...

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 and enable end-user organizations to comply with

software license A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...

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 ''determin ...

, trial licenses, subscription licenses, feature-based licenses, and

floating licensing Floating licensing, also known as concurrent licensing or network licensing, is a software licensing approach in which a limited number of licenses for a software application are shared among a larger number of users over time. When an authorized ...

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 A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

or license USB keys, floating licenses,

network licenses Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

, concurrent license etc.

References

License Management Software

External links

Floating License Management

License4J Floating License Server User Guide

Cloud Software Licensing
{{Software distribution System administration

Manager Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities ...