Bouncer- uma solução distribuída para controle de licenças de software.

Abstract

Piracy is one of the biggest problems that the software industry faces nowadays. One fact that turns the illegal appropriation of software so frequent and attractive is that there is no loss of quality in the digital copy process. Digital copies are as good as their original counterparts. License management services are getting increasingly more importance among the solutions to this problem. These services verify if a given application is in accordance with the revenue agreements (i.e., it is not an illegal copy). However, the inclusion of license management in a computing environment creates a number of additional technical support tasks. Moreover, license managers demand the maintenance of technical support staff by the developers'-companies to interact with customers, and executing tasks such as generating software keys based on customers' environment information and re-configuring license policies. This is not suitable for small companies structures that produces shrink-wrap software packages. In this work, we présent Bouncer, a fault-tolerant, self-configurable and suport-free licensing solution. These characteristics make Bouncer a feasible candidate for the shrink-wrap software packages licensing market.