What is the state of floating licensing technology in the industry?

Conventional floating license systems have a long list of functionality limitations, deployability issues and security vulnerabilities. Among others, the license lifetime is limited to application execution time which is not necessarily what is required; there is no concept of named user licensing; it is trivial to oversubscribe floating licenses, particularly for “borrowed” licenses; it can realistically be deployed only in LAN environments owing to the chatty stateful protocol and the inability to operate in WAN / VPN environments without significant configuration; it does not scale; it is not a high-availability system; an application that is to be sold with both per-seat licensing and floating licensing requires two separate integrations resulting in two separate binary distributions; and several others.

Several floating licensing systems based on the above model and architecture are commercially available. ISV’s rarely develop their own. Orion is an example of a commercial solution that adopts a radically different approach to floating licensing in order to overcome the above limitations and provide additional capabilities. It is important to note, however, that Orion can be used in degenerate mode to provide the above familiar simplistic floating licensing capability.