Licensing overview

While Entitlement v4 stores which user or what device is assigned a license to a product, it is not a complete licensing system. Licensing systems typically focus on low-latency license verification, domain-specific license information, and license enforcement. The following information outlines some key differences.

Products are responsible for license enforcement. Entitlement provides the information to enable licensing systems and license enforcement.

What is license enforcement? License enforcement is the process of verifying the terms of the license are met. The following examples of license enforcement are common:

• Checking that a user logging into a product is assigned a license for that product.
• Checking that a device is under the licensed quota of data transfer used.

Entitlement enables these enforcement checks by storing a) who or what is assigned a license, and b) feature usage limits and current amounts. However, Entitlement cannot control whether the products enforce these checks. A product could decide to enable anybody who logs in to use the product, or that devices limited to 1 GB of bandwidth/month can transfer any amount of data. Most groups decide to build their own licensing layer on top of Entitlement to control license enforcement, rather than relying only on the simple mechanisms provided in Entitlement.