consulting question.... (DRM)

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Wed May 27 10:12:12 EDT 2009


The introduction of the acronym "DRM" has drawn all the hysteria it  
always does.

The description you've posted much more closely matches license (or  
sometimse entitlement) management software than DRM.  There are many  
companies active in this field.  Many are small, but Microsoft sells  
some solution and there are moderately large companies around.  Some  
of these have been around for many years.

Traditionally, license management software looked at local files or  
databases rather than out on the Internet.  However, I'm sure Internet  
options exist.

The better software of this sort is challenging to crack.  Certainly,  
none of it is *impossible* to crack - though the best dongle-based  
systems are probably extremely difficult (but also unacceptable for  
most kinds of software).

For the most part, software like this aims to keep reasonably honest  
people honest.  Yes, they can probably hire someone to hack around the  
licensing software.  (There's generally not much motivation for J  
Random User to break this stuff, since it protects business software  
with a specialized audience.) But is it (a) worth the cost; (b) worth  
the risk - if you get caught, there's clear evidence that you broke  
things deliberately.

Probably the greatest use for such software is not in preventing  
unlicensed users from running it at all but in enforcing contractual  
limits - e.g., you can only use this to manage up to X machines.   
Every company that has sold software with that kind of contract will  
likely find that, unless the software enforces the limitation, its  
customers will exceed it - often unknowingly, often by large factors.

I'd suggest that you, and the company you're consulting to, spend some  
time understanding the market.  What kind of software vendors are you  
selling to?  B2B is a very different marketplace from consumer.   
Within B2B, "high touch" sales are very different from mass market.   
If you go international, a great deal depends on where you think  
you're going to sell.  If you are ultimately depending on contractual  
enforcement, with the licensing software just an encouragement to good  
behavior, you're fine in the US and Western Europe, but you're not  
going to have a happy time in, say, Russia and China.

A Google search on "license management software" turns up many hits,  
including an overview article that may be useful:  http://software.forbes.com/license-management-software 
   (One thing to be aware of is that this phrase is a bit ambiguous,  
covering both software a vendor puts in to its code to manage  
licenses, and software sold to large end users to help them keep track  
of what licenses they are using.  The listing in the article covers  
both, but is still incomplete - it misses one of the long-established  
companies, Acresso Software - a new name - that sells the FLEXnet  
license enforcement software, a business it's been in for at least 10  
years or so.)

                                                         -- Jerry

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