FLEXlm

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FLEXlm is a popular software license manager. It is commonly used in corporate environments to provide floating licences to multiple end users of computer software.

Computer software can frequently be licensed in a variety of ways. A license to use a piece of software may be associated with a specific machine (in FLEXlm speak, node-locked), permitting it to only run on that machine (node in a network). Alternatively, a company may buy a pool of floating licenses and these licenses may be allocated dynamically to machines, a license being checked-out when a user begins using the software on any given machine and checked-in when the user finishes using the software. In this way, for example, a company might buy a pool of 50 licenses but support a user community of hundreds of occasional users of the software (so long as no more than 50 users ever want to use the software simultaneously).

FLEXlm supports both usage models.

Originally developed by Globetrotter, it was marketed under license for some time by Highland Software before returning to Globetrotter's software catalog. FLEXlm was then acquired by Macrovision which subsequently renamed it to FLEXnet.

It is commonly used for the management of licenses of Electronic design automation software, normally on computers running UNIX type of operating systems.

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[edit] Related products

JTB FlexReport is an application from JTB World that creates HTML, graphic and database reports on the license usage of applications that uses FLEXnet/FLEXlm.

X-Formation is a vendor of licensing tools which extends the usage of FLEXlm/FLEXnet, LM-X, IBM LUM and Sentinel LM. Tools include License Statistics which is a low-cost solution for understanding license usage by the means of real-time generated graphs, a user-driven query tool, html pages showing who's using licenses and custom extension. With License Statistics you can even make your own custom parsers.

Optilicense is a tool that connects to FLEXlm license servers and captures license usage data for each vendor application. Once collected, the license usage data is organized in a repository for analysis using a variety of graphs and text reports. OptiLicense is a simple intuitive tool that makes license usage tracking process less person centric and increases productivity in any (CAE,EDA) organization.

Open iT is a usage metering and reporting solution developed to equip advanced users and complex organizations with the most flexible and powerful reporting tools available for FLEXlm, IBM LUM, Sentinel/Abaqus/Elan, RLM and other license managers. Benefits include true global concurrency reporting, allocation of cost/pay-per-use and the ability to distinguish between active or inactive usage of software, and if applicable, automatically free up unused licenses. In addition, other modules allow tracking of stand alone applications or even web based applications for a unified view of the global usage of software resources.