Licensed software hardware dependent

To our knowledge, this is the first complete book on hardware-dependent software, a critical topic in embedded system design Comprehensive introductions HdS coverage with many applications Examples from industrial automotive and communication designs Includes supplementary material: sn.

Front Matter Pages i-xii. Hardware-dependent Software. Pages Hardware Abstraction Layer. Back Matter Pages About this book Introduction Hardware-dependent Software HdS plays a key role in desktop computers and servers for many years. Mainly due to its flexibility, the possibility of late change, and the quick adaptability, the relevance of HdS in the domains of embedded systems and in Systems-on-Chip SoCs has significantly increased.

Despite its importance, the role of HdS is most often underestimated and the topic is not well represented in literature and education. To address this, Hardware-dependent Software brings together experts from different HdS areas. For Copyleft licenses, the interactions and dependencies between proprietary- or non-Copyleft- licensed programs and Copyleft-licensed programs determine when and how the source code redistribution conditions of the GPL or LGPL are triggered.

Remember that the relationship between programs and their dependencies can be more or less intimate: Arm's length, Handshake, or Merged. Copyleft licenses may impact proprietary or non-Copyleft-licensed programs based on the nature of the dependencies and interaction between programs:. Arm's length is similar to "independent process" or "command line. Relationships may flow through a dependency chain and the related license conditions may also follow that dependency chain. What if a proprietary program depends on a program that depends on a program that depends on a program that is GPL-licensed?

It depends! Eventually the GPL license may flow up or down to a proprietary program for a "Handshake" or "Merged" style of relationship, unless the relevant license has an exception to stop this flow e. The recommended approach to properly handle dependencies -- whether you write proprietary or FLOSS-licensed code:. Using these elements, you can define a policy for which dependencies may be acceptable or not in your context and document your corresponding obligations for the use of FLOSS programs.

Like this blog post? Share it with your friends! Software Dependencies: A not-too-technical introduction. How software is built Larger software systems and products are commonly assembled from many software components. Dependencies A program may require one or more other programs to run the "dependencies".

Provisioning may occur at build-time or run-time; for instance when a JavaScript programs is fetched from a remote repository or CDN when you load a web page. The dependency relationship between two programs may be more or less "intimate": At arm's length, where the programs are entirely separated and may only communicate by writing or reading files, or by network interaction At a handshake level - where the programs call each other's subroutines aka "functions" directly and exchange data directly Merged or combined into a single larger executable program Program dependencies: programs can be compiled and combined Programs are often compiled: the text of the programs source code is transformed in a binary code that the machine can understand and execute, i.

Free, libre and open source licensing and dependencies Many software licenses have different requirements for source code and for binaries BSD, MIT. If so, run away fast — they're lying. Good licensing is based on well-known techniques described below. If so, they're lying; run for safety. Usually those 3 questions are enough to tell if a company is selling snake oil or if the company actually knows what it's doing.

Email us at support wyday. Inevitably our product's feature column would have the most checkmarks. We won't insult your intelligence. Licensing software is enormously complex behind-the-scenes and it's very hard to do an honest comparison with other licensing software unless you deeply understand how proper licensing works. That's what this section will be covering.

In the process of describing how hardware-locked licensing works I'll be covering how LimeLM is better than its competitors. I'll start first with how LimeLM trounces its competitors in the broad sense.

Then I'll get into the nitty-gritty details of how the hardware-locked licensing works. There are lots of differences between LimeLM and our competitors. However, the root of all the differences between LimeLM and all other licensing products is our philosophy.

We built LimeLM from the ground up to be simple; simple for you and simple for your customers who will be running your software. This difference in philosophy exhibits itself in several ways. For starters, we make it easy for you the software company to get LimeLM and TurboActivate integrated into your app and your sales processes.

Plus we make it just as easy for your customers to activate in under 1 second. For instance, on the developer side of things, I bet you can get TurboActivate integrated in your app and everything configured in less than an hour from the time you sign up for LimeLM ; you can't say the same about any of our competitors.

We make it simple from the first moment you touch LimeLM, and we continue this theme of simplicity throughout your use of it. Of course the list of advantages LimeLM has over its competitors can go on for miles. A few of the highlights are:. TurboActivate works with all programming languages and we don't charge you for every programming language or platform you want to use. When you sign up for LimeLM you immediately get access to all example code and libraries for all platforms.

You can host LimeLM on your own servers or let us handle all the work. We make it easy for you to make recurring revenue from your apps for example charging on a monthly basis. We provide ready-made examples showing how to integrate LimeLM in your purchase process thereby automating everything so your customers can use your software mere seconds after placing an order. There are many, many more features.

You can check out our help articles that get into some specific use-cases for LimeLM and TurboActivate. You can also check out the tour of LimeLM which has a broad overview with pretty pictures showing how you can use LimeLM. The whole purpose of hardware-locked licensing is that you have full control over where your customers install your software.

More specifically it means you get paid for every copy of your software. However the hardware-locked licensing has to be designed correctly to be effective. That's what this section covers: how well designed hardware-locked licensing works. Your customer enters a serial e. Based on this cryptographically signed block your app or installer will know whether the user is allowed to use your application or not.

Below is a brief description of what each of these steps means, and how well designed licensing like LimeLM handles them. When your customer purchases your software you send them a product key. Of course if you're using LimeLM, you can just plop this TurboActivate wizard directly in your app and let us handle all the nuances of the user experience.

So even if your customer own 2 identical computers that came off the manufacturing line one after another, TurboActivate will still be able to tell these computers apart. The LimeLM servers will look at the product key and the fingerprint and determine what action to take. For instance, when a customer buys 2 copies of your software you'll send them a single product key e. That is, the product key can be activated on 2 computers.

Can check if activated without being online : TurboActivate can verify the computer is activated by comparing the computer's fingerprint to the cryptographic signature. This can all be done without being connected to the internet. For all practical purposes such a forgery is mathematically impossible to create. Now you know how a properly designed hardware-locked licensing product, like LimeLM, works behind the scenes. However, well designed hardware-locked licensing like LimeLM is hard to find.

The common mistake 3 rd party licensing products and in-house designed licensing have are the following:. Those are just the most egregious mistakes crummy licensing companies make. In other words this is snake oil. In other words, the IT administrator copies the software bit-for-bit from one hard drive to hundreds or thousands of other hard drives. This is a perfectly legal and widely used time-saving technique.

Thus, the company gets thousands of free copies of your software. Properly designed hardware-locked licensing like LimeLM is not susceptible to problems like these.