Projects, features and versions¶

Projects¶

Licensecc is a library to protect your software from unauthorized copies. It does so generating a private key to sign the licenses and a public key to verify the signatures. The public key is included in binary form in the compiled licensecc-static-lib library at compile time.

Since we’re open source the keys can’t be generated once and committed to github, we need to generate them before the compilation of the library.

A project in licensecc terms refers to a folder containing a private key, a public key and a file containing customizations. Licensecc source tree can host multiple projects simultaneously, but can compile only one project at once.

Projects are stored by default in the licensecc\projects folder, though you can place them elsewhere. Below the structure that is automatically created for you at compile time: there is one project named ‘DEFAULT’ used to compile and run tests.

projects
└── DEFAULT       #(your project name)
    ├── include
    │   └── licensecc
    │       └── DEFAULT
    │           ├── licensecc_properties.h
    │           └── public_key.h
    ├── licenses
    │   └── test.lic
    └── private_key.rsa

If you want to use or create a new project in the configure phase of cmake specify the parameter ‘-DLCC_PROJECT_NAME’.

A licensecc-project corresponds to one executable it has to be licensed. So for instance suppose you have two executables “Foo” and “Bar” and you want to issue licenses separately (licenses of “Foo” incompatible with “Bar”) you need to:

create two licensecc-projects eg. “FooLicensecc” and “BarLicensecc” (names are for example here, you can choose them as you like, remember they will appear in the license file).
for each project:
- configure, compile and install licensecc

In “Foo” and “Bar” (your original software) be sure to locate and link the right version of licensecc-static-lib. Eg. in your “Foo” CmakeLists.txt:

Copy Findlicensecc.cmake from examples project in your project ./cmake/ folder. Add the following lines to your CmakeLists.txt

SET(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH} "${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/")
find_package(licensecc 2.0.0 REQUIRED COMPONENTS "FooLicensecc")

Features¶

A licensed software can have multiple functions that can be enabled or disabled independently using license files. Each software function takes the name of feature in Licensecc. Each feature can (need to) be licensed separately, the licenses then are merged in one license file and sent to the customer.

There are parameters in lccgen to produce a multi-feature license directly avoiding the manual merge:

lccgen license issue -f PROJECT_NAME,MY_AWESOME_FEATURE -o example.lic

To verify a feature pass the feature name in the CallerInformations structure (see: verify license):

CallerInformations callerInfo = {"\0", "MY_AWESOME_FEATURE"};
LCC_EVENT_TYPE result = acquire_license(&callerInfo, nullptr, &licenseInfo);

For a working example see program_features in examples project.

Versions¶

Todo

Versions are not yet implemented.