Tue 7 Jun 2011
How to Make a License Manager Sound Sexy
Posted by Scott Westfall under SlickEdit Products
[2] Comments
Licensing: there’s just nothing sexy about it. It is a reality in the software business, like deadlines and defects.
After years of using a third-party license manager, we decided to write our own License Manager. The old one worked reasonably well, but the company tried to gouge us when we wanted to add two new platforms: 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux.
As a product company, it’s never an easy decision to have someone work on something like licensing. It’s not the kind of feature that motivates people to buy your product. But there was just no arguing with the economics of the situation.
As part of finalizing the release, I write up the list of new features. Usually, this is pretty straightforward. This year, it was a little tougher. We had fewer new features due to the amount of time spent updating existing capabilities. And one of my few new features is the License Manager. How do I make that look really interesting on the list?
Maybe if I gave it a clever name like, “License Manager: License to Code”.
Hmm, Roman numerals make things look cool, “License Manager XVI”.
Maybe if I shortened the name it would sound more high tech, “LicMan”. No, not that!
Perhaps, the language of business obfuscation could be used, “Product Enablement System”. That doesn’t work either.
I know! How about an acronym that spells out something awesome, like “SlickEdit License Instance Capture Knowledgebase for Efficient Distribution, Inventory, and Tracking (SLICKEDIT)”. No, that just makes the name of this thing the same as the product.
In the end, there’s just nothing I could do to make this sound like more than it is. It’s a License Manager. We did everything we could to make it fast and convenient. In the end, it’s like getting blood drawn: the best you can hope for is that it is over quickly and you can get on with things.
June 8th, 2011 at 1:27 pm
As I work for a company that supplies license management solutions (and no, not the one he mentioned, as we do NOT charge additional fees for extra platforms) I was interested to see this.
Frankly, our experience is that software vendors who don’t have specific expertise in license management, but try writing their own system anyway, generally come back to us anywhere from 9 months to years later, as it didn’t work out for various reasons. This happened so often, we wrote a paper about it based on the failure modes we heard about: Issues to Consider Before Building Your Own Software License Manager.
I hope your approach works out well for you, but others may want to think twice, and reflect on the issues we’ve seen others encounter.
Regards,
Dominic
June 8th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
I have the same response when I hear about companies that think they can quickly develop an editor. It’s funny–a carpenter who builds houses wouldn’t automatically assume he could build a boat, but in software we always think we can write anything.
Hopefully, we’ll be the exception case to your experience. Thanks for posting that paper. It was a good read.