GenLM: License Management for Grid and Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

Software license management allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to control the access of their products. It is a fundamental part of the ISVs' business strategy. A wide range of products has been developed in order to address license management. There are, however, only few ongoing works with regard to license management in grid and cloud computing environments. This paper presents our work on GenLM, a license management solution suitable for these environments. It has been built in order to provide a secure and robust solution for ISVs that want to extend their software usage to these systems. We provide ISVs a toolchain to implement arbitrary software licensing models. At the same time we ensure that licenses are mobile, i.e. they can be used on any resource the user has access to.