License Activation Types
We define a license activation as the process of binding a license to a device.
In LicenseSpring, there are 3 different activation strategies for licenses:
- Online
- Offline
- Air-gapped
Online activations are pretty straightforward and are usually the least cumbersome for the end user performing the activation. We make available a license API, and maintain a fairly comprehensive set of wrappers. In most cases, we would suggest to use online activations.
The general process for activating licenses online is that the end user would enter their license key (or email/password) into the app and initiate the activation process. This will send a request to LicenseSpring via http, which will include the license, product code, and device identifier (typically generated by the SDK). If successful, the server will return the license entitlements in a JSON, which are then parsed by the SDK (if the app is using it), allowing the software to be configured according to the license agreement.
Even if a license is activated online, you can still perform offline license checks. The SDKs can be configured to update a local license file upon every successful license check.
Activating licenses sometimes cannot be done over the internet. For this situation, we maintain an offline license portal, where the SDK generates a request file. The user uploads that file on our offline portal, which will return a license file. This license file can only be used to activate by the device that specifically generated the request.
The portal can be found at offline.licensespring.com.
If the client machine activating the software license will not have access to the internet, then you can activate the license using this process.
License files can be updated and sent to the end user after activation, without the end user needing to generate a new request file.
Some customers have an additional requirement that once their applications have been deployed, files cannot leave the network, so they cannot use the offline activation mechanism described above.
The air-gapped license activation process entails that license policy files are deployed at the same time as software application binaries. Through a series of code exchanges generated by the LicenseSpring server and the client machine (initialization code, activation code, confirmation codes), one of the license policies can be activated for that device.
This is somewhat of a cumbersome process, so we only recommend using it to deploy software for customers that have the most stringent security requirements and where offline activations are not acceptable.
