Hello again - I thought I'd spawn a new thread based on some of the responses of my previous one. We stand on both sides of the fences, we have a small VFX studio and we also sell software - on the VFX studio side I can understand why virtual license servers are a good thing, especially for managing demos of software without muddying the water of production. The software sales side finds this contrary to the point of have license servers in the first place. It's easy to argue that people will steal software no matter what and that licenses are just a way of keeping honest people honest, but in the day and age of cloud computing where virtual servers can live at amazon it's going to blow our lawyers minds to work out the legalities of the EULA. With that said, licensing is changing - any thoughts on how this could/should evolve in the future to protect developers but also make solutions more flexible for studios? We've drawn up a subscription based system which I think many developers are moving too - maybe for different reasons ( subscriptions are a steadier stream on income and share holders dig this ) but it means projects can grow and shrink license usage. The concept is that the licenses are sold on a project basis vs. a studio basis ( though we wouldn't frown at sharing ) and maybe those licenses need to be used in two different locations on the same project - fine. It's a little more work as you have to re-issue licenses more frequently but it seems rather flexible. The only hole we see in the plan is that you're doubling the number of possible end users for each license so do you increase the fee a little more to accommodate the extra support required? As the client side of this predicament are there any thoughts? There's already plenty of satellite studios out there, are licenses currently shared or just re-purchased? cheers

I'm a preacher of GPL, so please excuse the ignorance. I do however appreciate that people should get paid for what they do, but poorly designed licence servers often interfeer with the end goal; to let them do their work. Cross-site failover being a big hurdle when it goes bacon bits up. I really do not understand why licence server developers are trying to re-invent the wheel. There is a perfecty well designed system already in place: DHCP/DNS/OpenLDAP. Replace 'physical node' with 'node licence' at the design level and jobs a good one. Throw in OIDs and you have Jessica Rabbit. Tudor ________________________________________ From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com] on behalf of Colin Doncaster [colin@peregrinevfx.com] Sent: 04 July 2011 13:36 To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: [SSA-Discuss] Virtual License Servers? Hello again - I thought I'd spawn a new thread based on some of the responses of my previous one. We stand on both sides of the fences, we have a small VFX studio and we also sell software - on the VFX studio side I can understand why virtual license servers are a good thing, especially for managing demos of software without muddying the water of production. The software sales side finds this contrary to the point of have license servers in the first place. It's easy to argue that people will steal software no matter what and that licenses are just a way of keeping honest people honest, but in the day and age of cloud computing where virtual servers can live at amazon it's going to blow our lawyers minds to work out the legalities of the EULA. With that said, licensing is changing - any thoughts on how this could/should evolve in the future to protect developers but also make solutions more flexible for studios? We've drawn up a subscription based system which I think many developers are moving too - maybe for different reasons ( subscriptions are a steadier stream on income and share holders dig this ) but it means projects can grow and shrink license usage. The concept is that the licenses are sold on a project basis vs. a studio basis ( though we wouldn't frown at sharing ) and maybe those licenses need to be used in two different locations on the same project - fine. It's a little more work as you have to re-issue licenses more frequently but it seems rather flexible. The only hole we see in the plan is that you're doubling the number of possible end users for each license so do you increase the fee a little more to accommodate the extra support required? As the client side of this predicament are there any thoughts? There's already plenty of satellite studios out there, are licenses currently shared or just re-purchased? cheers __________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by MessageLabs -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email is intended solely for the addressee and is strictly confidential. If you are not the addressee, please do not read, print, re-transmit, store or act in reliance on it or any attachments. Instead please email it back to the sender and delete the message from your computer. Email transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error free and Aardman accepts no liability for changes made to this email (and any attachments) after it was sent or for viruses arising as a result of this email transmission. Aardman reserves the right to intercept any emails or other communication for permitted purposes, in accordance with applicable laws, which you send to, or receive from, any of the employees or agents of Aardman. WWW.AARDMAN.COM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by MessageLabs

Isn't that already possible? At least the LDAP backend part? ... or is that just flexnet not flexlm? Are there SRV record standards for FlexLM etc.? It's not essential if you only have 5-10 licenses but on a studio level it seems perfect if there are 100's or 1000's of licenses to dole out. On 2011/07/04, at 5:02 PM, Tudor Georgescu wrote: > > I'm a preacher of GPL, so please excuse the ignorance. I do however appreciate that people should get paid for what they do, but poorly designed licence servers often interfeer with the end goal; to let them do their work. > > Cross-site failover being a big hurdle when it goes bacon bits up. > > I really do not understand why licence server developers are trying to re-invent the wheel. There is a perfecty well designed system already in place: DHCP/DNS/OpenLDAP. > > Replace 'physical node' with 'node licence' at the design level and jobs a good one. Throw in OIDs and you have Jessica Rabbit. > > Tudor >

We run most of our license servers on VMs (and most of our other servers for that matter). Software vendors who require a physical license server, and especially - gack! - a dongle, impose a massive additional cost on our company. Some are actually horrible enough to require their own dedicated physical license server. In cases like these it is so tempting to go to BitTorrent rather than the vendor for the software. Not that I would, I hasten to add. :-) As a software developer you need to be realistic about what a license server is for. It is there to assist honest people to be honest. For instance, we don't have the resources to track the usage of each one of our Pixar licenses, we rely on the license server to do that for us. I have yet to find a piece of licensed software that you couldn't obtain from an "alternate" source. If you think that having a license server will stop your software being pirated you are dreaming. Regards, -Jeremy p.s. software vendors who don't support a centralized license manager also impose an unwarranted cost on us. As a business we don't have time to enter "activation codes" every time we want to move a piece of software from one seat to another. You _can_ use a centralized license manager for node-locked licenses! -- Jeremy Webber Senior Systems Engineer Animal Logic Pty Ltd T: +61 2 9383 4837 F: +61 2 9383 4801

So to follow the concept of keeping honest people honest, say a vendor decides to not provide licenses with said software but asks studios to pay a support fee that is equivalent to the cost of a license offering, say, multiple tiers. 5, 20, 100 and site license. When crunch time hits and 200 more blades are installed for rendering, who turns around and writes the cheque out to said vendor voluntarily without the feeling of production grinding to a halt if said fee wasn't paid? How about I not pay for a ticket when I go to a theatre and decide after the fact if it was worth my $17? I'm not trying to be funny, but it's clear that it's not ideal on the client end but how does a vendor make sure they get their moneys worth. Indeed there are studios out there that are actually using illegal licenses of software on productions now and the ever decreasing profit margins are making it more appealing to the company owners that don't feel that sense of just that others might. What problem is the VM hosts solving ( I know, the exact problem I had, but are there others? ) and what would an ideal scenario be? On 2011-07-04, at 7:52 PM, Jeremy Webber wrote: > We run most of our license servers on VMs (and most of our other servers for that matter). > > Software vendors who require a physical license server, and especially - gack! - a dongle, impose a massive additional cost on our company. Some are actually horrible enough to require their own dedicated physical license server. > > In cases like these it is so tempting to go to BitTorrent rather than the vendor for the software. Not that I would, I hasten to add. :-) > > As a software developer you need to be realistic about what a license server is for. It is there to assist honest people to be honest. For instance, we don't have the resources to track the usage of each one of our Pixar licenses, we rely on the license server to do that for us. > > I have yet to find a piece of licensed software that you couldn't obtain from an "alternate" source. If you think that having a license server will stop your software being pirated you are dreaming. > > Regards, > -Jeremy > > p.s. software vendors who don't support a centralized license manager also impose an unwarranted cost on us. As a business we don't have time to enter "activation codes" every time we want to move a piece of software from one seat to another. You _can_ use a centralized license manager for node-locked licenses! > > -- > Jeremy Webber > Senior Systems Engineer > Animal Logic Pty Ltd > T: +61 2 9383 4837 > F: +61 2 9383 4801 >

On 05/07/2011, at 10:03 AM, Colin Doncaster wrote: > > So to follow the concept of keeping honest people honest, say a vendor decides to not provide licenses with said software but asks studios to pay a support fee that is equivalent to the cost of a license offering, say, multiple tiers. 5, 20, 100 and site license. When crunch time hits and 200 more blades are installed for rendering, who turns around and writes the cheque out to said vendor voluntarily without the feeling of production grinding to a halt if said fee wasn't paid? > Well I certainly would, and I hope so would others. This is commercial software used in a commercial environment. But a more realistic scenario is that the person responsible for deploying the blades knows nothing at all about your software license, which was ordered by someone in a different department, or the agreed restrictions. So they just order the blades, install them and the automated farm software starts using them. Without a license manager you have a completely unintentional, but very plausible, failure to comply. That is the value of a license manager to us (as a customer) - it assists us to comply with legal restrictions to which we have agreed. Without the license manager we have no practical mechanism of enforcing anything less than a site license and not much of the software we use requires enough seats to justify site licensing. BTW, most license managers enforce hard limits - I pay for 500 licenses so it issues 500 licenses. There is nothing wrong with that. But I have also used license managers which merely generate alerts when you exceed the licensed limit. The vendor trusts the customer to do the right thing and buy more licenses when required. Either method has similar business costs, so both are legitimate, but it shows there is more than one way to look at licensing. > How about I not pay for a ticket when I go to a theatre and decide after the fact if it was worth my $17? > I don't see how this is a relevant analogy at all. Using something without paying is always theft, but you have to give the purchaser a reasonable opportunity to pay. If your company has more than 10 people it is very unlikely that everybody knows what everybody else is doing. > What problem is the VM hosts solving ( I know, the exact problem I had, but are there others? ) and what would an ideal scenario be? I don't have the time or space to go into the benefits of virtualization. Suffice to say, if you have more than 10 people in your company and you aren't virtualizing your servers you are almost certainly wasting money and providing a far lower level of service than you could. We run a mid-sized company on 8 server blades (this is for virtual servers, not our render farm!) providing services equivalent to more than two full-height racks of 1U servers. And, except for the chassis, the hardware is fully redundant, with single physical server failure causing an outage of no longer than 5 minutes even in the worst case. And I can take any of the hardware components offline in-hours for planned maintenance without our end users even noticing. Indeed the blades even switch themselves on and off automatically depending on demand. The cost savings and service improvements are enormous. And we aren't even a large site. Regards, Jeremy -- Jeremy Webber Senior Systems Engineer Animal Logic Pty Ltd T: +61 2 9383 4837 F: +61 2 9383 4801

Thanks Jeremy, I understand the benefits of virtualization, I just meant more within the context of licensing. Though it sounds like non-hardware based ( ie. dongle or not supporting VM's ) and with soft limits is the ideal situation and possibly better than no licensing at all - for us this seems like a great idea for studios and maybe a slightly different model for individual licenses. On 2011-07-05, at 12:10 AM, Jeremy Webber wrote: > > > I don't have the time or space to go into the benefits of virtualization. Suffice to say, if you have more than 10 people in your company and you aren't virtualizing your servers you are almost certainly wasting money and providing a far lower level of service than you could. We run a mid-sized company on 8 server blades (this is for virtual servers, not our render farm!) providing services equivalent to more than two full-height racks of 1U servers. And, except for the chassis, the hardware is fully redundant, with single physical server failure causing an outage of no longer than 5 minutes even in the worst case. > > And I can take any of the hardware components offline in-hours for planned maintenance without our end users even noticing. Indeed the blades even switch themselves on and off automatically depending on demand. > > The cost savings and service improvements are enormous. And we aren't even a large site. > > Regards, > Jeremy > > -- > Jeremy Webber > Senior Systems Engineer > Animal Logic Pty Ltd > T: +61 2 9383 4837 > F: +61 2 9383 4801 >

I don't think anyone's arguing against licensing / license servers / enforced licenses at all. The problem (for clients) is one of fitting a hodgepodge of license systems into their environment -- we want license systems that are us-friendly: - Do *not* require dedicated machines (eats space and money and BTUs) - Do not require hardware keys (inconvenient, hard to virtualize) - Soft limits are great, but hard limits are fine as long as there's a way to increase licenses quickly. Waiting 2 days for new license keys to get generated is no good when you've got a sudden unexpected increase in need. Even the quickest, most-responsive vendors can be delayed issuing new keys / additional seats, especially when time differences are involved. --Rob Rob LaRose systems administrator imaginary forces | 530 west 25th street | new york | p 646.486.6868 | www.imaginaryforces.com On 7/5/11 7:59 AM, "Colin Doncaster" wrote: >Thanks Jeremy, > >I understand the benefits of virtualization, I just meant more within the >context of licensing. Though it sounds like non-hardware based ( ie. >dongle or not supporting VM's ) and with soft limits is the ideal >situation and possibly better than no licensing at all - for us this >seems like a great idea for studios and maybe a slightly different model >for individual licenses. > > >On 2011-07-05, at 12:10 AM, Jeremy Webber wrote: > >> >> >> I don't have the time or space to go into the benefits of >>virtualization. Suffice to say, if you have more than 10 people in your >>company and you aren't virtualizing your servers you are almost >>certainly wasting money and providing a far lower level of service than >>you could. We run a mid-sized company on 8 server blades (this is for >>virtual servers, not our render farm!) providing services equivalent to >>more than two full-height racks of 1U servers. And, except for the >>chassis, the hardware is fully redundant, with single physical server >>failure causing an outage of no longer than 5 minutes even in the worst >>case. >> >> And I can take any of the hardware components offline in-hours for >>planned maintenance without our end users even noticing. Indeed the >>blades even switch themselves on and off automatically depending on >>demand. >> >> The cost savings and service improvements are enormous. And we aren't >>even a large site. >> >> Regards, >> Jeremy >> >> -- >> Jeremy Webber >> Senior Systems Engineer >> Animal Logic Pty Ltd >> T: +61 2 9383 4837 >> F: +61 2 9383 4801 >> > ________________________________ This e-mail is intended only for the named person or entity to which it is addressed and contains valuable business information that is proprietary, privileged, confidential and/or otherwise protected from disclosure. If you received this e-mail in error, any review, use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail is strictly prohibited. Please notify us immediately of the error via e-mail to postmaster@imaginaryforces.com and please delete the e-mail from your system, retaining no copies in any media. We appreciate your cooperation. ...imaginaryforces.com...

+1+1 With budgets tight and turnarounds tighter, we more often than not find ourselves needing to up our licenses for new artists starting the next day on a show due the day after. Working with a VAR like RFX helps because we've got another trainer in our corner, but oh how great it would be to punch a credit card into a website and have a FlexLM key autogenerated. On 7/5/2011 7:09 AM, Rob LaRose wrote: > - Soft limits are great, but hard limits are fine as long as there's a way > to increase licenses quickly. Waiting 2 days for new license keys to get > generated is no good when you've got a sudden unexpected increase in need. > Even the quickest, most-responsive vendors can be delayed issuing new > keys / additional seats, especially when time differences are involved. -- Steve Pugh VFX Producer Eden FX 12421 W. Olympic Blvd. Santa Monica, CA, 90064 310-481-7002 - W. 661-313-3299 - C.

Hi Colin, On 05/07/2011, at 9:59 PM, Colin Doncaster wrote: > Thanks Jeremy, > > I understand the benefits of virtualization, I just meant more within the context of licensing. Anything which requires a physical server is a major cost for us. First there is the purchase price of the server. Then the recurrent cost of maintenance, the data centre real estate it occupies (rack space, cooling, etc). And of course the staff effort in maintaining a device which may go wrong, is different to our "standard" way of doing things, etc. An application has to be really performance-demanding in order to justify a physical server nowadays. License servers, with their tiny CPU and I/O requirements, don't fall into that. >From the later post by Todd Smith, > - Time taken to install the license server. (etc) Hear hear! I have to maintain license servers here, and dealing with the sheer diversity of them, plus the fact that many of them are incredibly poorly written, is a major bane of my work life. My favourite pet peeves: - anything physical like a dongle is the absolute pits! - no way to query license information from a script (we have a Perl based license reporting and alerting system, but some license servers can only be queried by a GUI); - no way to install or update licenses without interrupting service; - weird platform dependencies - we recently had a license server fail when I upgraded the firmware on the underlying physical server. WTF??? Regards, Jeremy -- Jeremy Webber Senior Systems Engineer Animal Logic Pty Ltd T: +61 2 9383 4837 F: +61 2 9383 4801