gnu@toad.com (John Gilmore) says:

It would probably be a public service if some interested parties were to determine the ``encryption'' method that Sun Express, the standard Sun ``license manager'', and other packages use. At the moment, the details of these technologies are not described in the public literature (as far as I know).

Rather than have these companies discover years too late that their "unlockable" software is really unlockable by anyone who understands cryptography, it'd be better for them to learn it this year, while they are still handling low volumes of programs that way. Also maybe they will stop dumping these programs-that-you-have-but-must-pay-to-run on us.

John

I was in a meeting where the license manager technology was explained from a semi-technical, semi-business point of view. o There's a standard that many companies are using. It's for the rpc interface between licensed programs and license managers. The program calls the manager, tells it a couple things, and asks, is it okay for me to run? o License managers vary in the kinds of licenses they can support. There's enough variety of license possibilities to make your head swim. o License managers generally work from "licenses," which are text files on your computer that describe the terms of particular licenses in a license-manager-specific language. o I think they use RSA, MD5, etc., for instance in signing logs that they keep. o License-managers are themselves expensive and licensed, with a variety of up-front/per platform/per site/per end user/per developer license combinations as well as the feature variety I mentioned. I could probably find out what public documents exist if nobody else on the list knows. -fnerd quote me fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)