Hey #tribe How does licensing for on prem products works? Like having enterprise edition? • Do software always contact some licensing servers to validate? • Do software contact the product apis internally to validate the license and features allowed? • How does it work for solutions which wont allow external access? Any good reads or insights from folks who have implemented them for the product would help?

Any specific product that you are looking into?

This is from my experience installing similar products and doing some research on writing a licence layer a few years ago:

Do software always contact some licensing servers to validate?

Yes. Nowadays, I think this is the simplest way to do this and most companies would be okay while doing it. Also, you need not ping the external server on every boot up -- but you can do it so that it contacts it once and saves a key locally which is tied to the particular hardware (for example) and if the hardware changes, they would need to validate again. So copy-pasting the key to a new machine won't work. What hardware you are looking for and what params you are picking up to generate the key are of course secret and not shared with the outside world.

Do software contact the product apis internally to validate the license and features allowed?

In the example I shared above, the encrypted key that you are saving locally will have all the details and restrictions of what the product can and cannot do. So you not need to ping your own server to do this.

How does it work for solutions which wont allow external access?

In these cases, your product can generate a simplistic bit of code which is tied to the hardware or any other thing that you want to bind the software to. So maybe a GUID or something similar. I remember Microsoft doing this. Then the client takes this GUID and tells it to you over the phone or emails it to you. This is essentially the same thing that your software would have sent your server in Option 1 -- but in this case, it needs to be small enough to be communicated verbally easily. (An alternate can be that your software generates a file which contains the same info as from Option 1 shared above -- but then it may become a hassle for the company to get this file to you from a machine which is locked out). Then once your company has this code, it saves it to your systems and generates a licence key based on this. This could be a file that you email them that they need to copy paste or a simpler thing like a Serial Key / GUID that they need to type in. Depends on how much you can stretch.

@loud-glass-33663 thanks for detailed one