Thread

How does EE licensing work form a technical perspective? Are there serial numbers or codes? Or does an installed version of ExpressionEngine need to periodically verify/validate to a licensing server?

In other words: How is licensing enforced?

I am concerned that potential DRM and copy protection mechanisms may prevent flexible deployment of ExpressionEngine. In the worst case, copy protection methods can break things or hamper performance.

Welcome to the forum, snapplez -

Each license has its own license number, but these are not enforced by code; instead we entrust our community to purchase a license for each project and hope that you guys do “the right thing”.

Does that help alleviate your concerns?

Lisa,

Thank you for the response - this does alleviate my concerns. We sometimes get into a world-of-pain with the various software licenses we use. Ioncube Encoder comes to mind as a particularly good example of harsh copy protection (each license is locked to a particular platform and network interface card - you must generate a license request file and submit it to Ioncube to receive a unique license key file. if you lose the file and/or do not unlicense the software then the license it lost). I would prefer not to deal with the trouble.

I think we will try EE and see how it goes.

One more thing…

Does the software need to reach out the “mother ship” at all?  Does it communicate back to a central server indicating how we use the software - or is there any type of tracking mechanisms at all.

Again, I prefer to avoid software that does this kind of intrusive thing. Example: we have Windows 7 machines that must talk to Microsoft servers periodically to stay activated.

One more thing…

Does the software need to reach out the “mother ship” at all?  Does it communicate back to a central server indicating how we use the software - or is there any type of tracking mechanisms at all.

Again, I prefer to avoid software that does this kind of intrusive thing. Example: we have Windows 7 machines that must talk to Microsoft servers periodically to stay activated.

Hi Snapplez,

There are two instances in which EE will “phone home.”

1. If you use the Blacklist/Whitelist module, EE will phone home to update the list. If it can’t reach us for some reason, nothing is shut down.

2. Occasionally we will include a survey with an EE update. We ask for server info to judge if its okay to increase the server requirements and collect other technical usage data. These surveys are always opt-in.

While piracy is a real issue for us, so far we’ve been fortunate to have a community that 99.9% honest. We’ve had no need to enforce a stricter technical mechanism to enforce the license. Hopefully we never will. If that does happen, we’ll have an open conversation with our Community prior to implementing it.

A good and open approach - I like it. You’ve earned at least one more customer today.

I would have already purchased, but there is no way for the me transfer or share a cart with the person who has to pay with a purchasing card.

A good and open approach - I like it. You’ve earned at least one more customer today.

I would have already purchased, but there is no way for the me transfer or share a cart with the person who has to pay with a purchasing card.

You can email us post-purchase and we can transfer a license to anybody you’d like. The only thing to be aware of in that scenario is that once the license is transferred, the ability to download is also transferred that account. In other words, we strict the ability to download to the license holder.