Method for licensing software
AssigneeSiemens Aktiengesellschaft
InventorsJohannes Birzer, Mirko Danz, Andreas Hartinger, Martin Kiesel
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Abstract
A method is disclosed for licensing software components and providing access authorization to software components and/or instantiations of software objects through licenses, wherein a license is associated with each software module and/or the instantiation of a module. Licensing is based on a comparison between acquired licenses and the licenses required for an application. A comparison is performed by a license manager which in distributed environments is advantageously implemented as a mobile agent.
Claims11
A method for licensing and/or access authorization of software modules for an industrial control or computer system, comprising the steps of:
- providing the software modules that are subject to a license with at least one piece of information about a license requirement applying to the software module;
- authorizing use of a software module if a required license for the software module has been obtained;
- providing a license manager for monitoring occasionally or periodically the number of licenses for the software modules subject to license in the industrial control or computer systems;
- comparing the monitored number of licenses with the number of licenses required by the industrial control or computer systems for using the software modules subject to a license;
- and
- authorized use of the software modules subject to a license, if the number of the used software modules subject to a license is equal to or smaller than the number of the licenses.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.