Pretty sure I remember Sun compilers, Veritas Volume Manager, and several other pieces of software having license keys that expired in the 1990's. Several of them used something called FlexLM.
Flexlm is alive and kicking. All of thr EDA software I use daily is protected by it. Its so archaic I can only assume its been broken seven ways from Sunday, but its still there. Id be interested to know if anyone here knows why it's the de facto standard for on premises software licencing.
The reason it became de-facto was it had bindings to C/C++/Java (what most commercial software was written in from the 90s onwards) and worked on all main platforms (including most Unixes). There wasn't much else which provided that in the 90s, early 2000s.
RLM is a slightly more modern alternative to FlexLM which some software has moved to over the past 10 years from FlexLM.
Thanks, interesting to see that this seems like a niche market thats relitively untapped. What seems initially strange is its protecting SW that can be as much as 100k per seat (e.g. ASIC EDA licenses) I'm sure less scrupulous operations are pirating the SW, though perhaps the EDA vendors know the compabies who do pay are honest lest they are found out so a truly secure licensing system is less critical to them.
Yes, I remember that. One of my first jobs out of school was a sysadmin for various unix machines (Sun, DEC, HP, and others I've forgotten.) FlexLM was everywhere. Annoying to configure. I'd install it, and have no way to test if it was working, since I didn't actually run any of that software. I'd email some people in another group to get help testing it, and would never hear back. The joys of corporate america. I moved on pretty quick.