Hi Glen,
glen herrmannsfeldt <
g...@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
[]
>> I must admit that I've always only considered piracy as the act of
>> 'copying/reproducing' without permission, hence not really applicable to
>> what the OP was doing.
>
> Not sure about the OP, but what do you call the case when you have
> a license, but flexlm mistakenly believes that all are in use?
These types of 'malfunctions' will never be accepted as a justification
for cracking the license and/or the license server. It would be
equivalent to stealing a car because yours is temporary out of gas!
In nearly every license there's a clause of NO WARRANTY that you accept
when using the software and while the software provider is relatively
keen to solve 'major' problems, they might not be equally interested to
get you out of the mud because you screwed up.
We all know that s**t happens and when it happens your only legal choice
is to call them and try to get an answer.
License managers are far away from perfection as any other artifact.
Nevertheless they provide a sufficiently detailed debugging
infrastructure to spot the issue rather soon. In your bug report provide
the log files of your lmgrd (is *always* good practice to store logging
information from the server to a file).
Often the issue is on your side and it's handled by some call center
delocalized in Sumatra. Some times though your question might trigger a
patch.
> I have in the past known license managers to get confused, for
> example when a machine crashes without releasing one.
with flexlm you can use lmremove in those cases, there's still an issue
of 'linger time' of 30 minutes which may affect you, but depending on
how many of you are using the license server you can simply think about
restarting the flexlm which will spawn the vendor daemons and clear
their internal list of used licenses, causing all users to lose their
grants. Usually the license grant is regained as soon as the lmgrd is
restarted, but it may happen that the license module in the client
application has caused the application to quit in the meantime.
The FLEXlm UM is IMO quite easy to follow:
http://www.vcpc.univie.ac.at/information/software/pgi/flexuser/TOC.htm
If the software product and their licensing schemes do not suit you
well, instead of breaking the law and forging the contract you signed
when you bought the product, put more efforts in alternative products
with a licensing philosophy that suit you more.
As a customer we always have a choice and we should use it to send clear
messages to vendors. Unfortunately the EDA tools empire is highly
fortified and cluttered by millions of patents which eventually minimize
your available choice.
Don't forget though that one of the most powerful means the EDA vendors
have to stay afloat is through 'lock ins'. Even if you crack the license
but *use* their software, you'll spread it within your organization and
create consense, expertise and an infrastructure around that product
that would be difficult to get away from. EDA vendors know that and can
push this philosophy to the extreme, i.e. as long as you use their
software they won't care much if you've paid for it.
Al