Hi - been 'watching' this thread with interest as the discussion has been relevant to what we are currently looking at.
One important consideration (to which we have no idea of a potential workable solution) is with the use of virtual machine environments. We use virtual machines (via VMware) to test the software we develop (ie different O/S's) AND each development project is undertaken in a specifically configured VM (this greatly reduces the problems that can occur when different development environments can clash - eg. Delphi7/Delphi2007). As a side benefit, backing up the files that comprise the VM provides an simple backup/restore process that allows a restore to a different physical computer if the original is unusable without the need to install & configure a new development/test environment. Further, we know that quite a number of our clients utilise virtual machine technology to run the server side of our applications. It is quite feasible to create a virtual machine, install software (including licensed software) and then clone/copy this virtual machine. I checked the Product ID and GUID of a VM and those of a copy of the VM and they match. As far as we are aware, there is no way to check the physical hardware (disk serial number, etc.) from within a VM, the calls just return the 'virtual machine' assigned values. An added complication is that the underlying 'host' computer O/S does not need to be Windows based ! Can anyone provide guidance as to how one might license a software package to one machine, either 'virtual' or 'physical'. One solution that we have seen used in the past is to 'UDP broadcast' a value (ie. an app/key pair) - if the application detects a 'matching' broadcast from another source, then a license breach has occurred - however, this approach has limitations (the two machines need to be on the same UDP broadcast network, a savvy person could simply block the UDP traffic & modern Windows include their own firewalls which would probably block the traffic by default !!) Brian __________________________________________________ Delphi-Talk mailing list -> [email protected] http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi-talk
