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Licensing 101
- Protect our Investment
- Allow you to conduct your business with certainty - Less likelihood of follow-up audit with demands for payment for inadvertent breach of license conditions
- Development - Allows you to compile (fglcomp) and execute (fglrun) a Genero program
- Deployment - Allows you to execute (fglrun) a Genero program
(Note: fglform is not licensed)
- Evaluation / Demo - Date limited, will not allow compilation or execution after a certain date.
- Backup / Disaster Recovery - Intended for use on a backup/high availability server. Should not be used for a training/QA server
- This is the formal process of installing a license on your server and telling us that you have installed the license
- The server Genero is installed on changes - DO NOT expect to copy our licensed software from one server to another server and expect it to function
- The directory of the Genero installation changes - DO NOT expect to copy our licensed software from one directory to another directory and expect it to function
(Note: you may also need to reactivate if some hardware changes on the server, or directory inode structure changes, or a major patch of the kernel occurs etc)
- There is a limit on the number of times a license number/key combination may be activated. If you hit the limit, there is a process whereby you need to get a new license key.
- When installing a Genero license, a license will first be installed temporarily. You then have 30 days to formally activate the license
- Your business should always be able to function using a temporary license using the license number and license key given to you when you purchase the Genero license - your business should not come to a grinding halt due to a Genero license issue (exception to this is free licenses which maybe date limited)
- User based - Payment and usage based on the number of concurrent users
- CPU based - Payment and usage based on the characteristics of the server
- GDC will consider a user to be concurrent if they are using the same GDC executable on the front-end client
- GWC will consider a user to be concurrent if child program launched from parent program
- Each running Genero Web Service program will be counted as a user
- A license will be released when a program terminates normally - Unexpected termination can lead to a license being consumed longer than anticipated e.g. front-end crash, web browser tab being closed. In those instances, a license will be recovered eventually by a timeout process that will stop a fglrun process if it believes its front-end has died, or a process that periodically checks for each license being consumed that the fglrun process is still running
- Each running web service server program is the equivalent of 1 user
- If the number of users is exceeded, a web service program will be queued rather than blocked
- For each individual web service, it is possible to control the maximum number of licenses consumed by that web service
- Imprecise science due to virtualization, threads etc - Definitive measure is to install Genero and run a script "fglWrt -a cpu"
- If CPU license installed is too small for server, license will fallback to 25 users per number of CPU's specified in license - install a 4 CPU license on 8 CPU server, this will fallback to be a 100 (4x25) user license
- Consider virtualization - a 4 CPU server that is both a database and Genero applications will require a 4 CPU license. If you virtualize this same server to a 2 CPU server for the database and a 2 CPU server for the application, this will require a 2 CPU license.
(Licensing can be an imprecise science. There are some exceptions where we are prepared to work with you to come to a fair and sound commercial decision)
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3-1 License - If you use a non Genero program as your main menu then a difference between desktop and web front-ends, is that your desktop programs will not consume additional licenses whilst your web programs will consume an additional license. A 3-1 license allows you to pay for X licenses, but in actual fact receive 3X licenses. This is based on the assumption that your average user will launch 3 Genero programs from this portal and using desktop only 1 license would be consumed, whilst with web 3 licenses will be consumed.
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Relaxed License - some servers when they virtualize alter some of the values that are used to check that the license is being used on the server that it is installed on. It is possible to get a license that omits the checks against these values. This is known to occur with Solaris Zones.
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By Negotiation - we are prepared to negotiate on an individual basis, to create win-win situations for both parties
- Simple test - count the number of bums on seats. Number of developers equals number of development licenses. Number of persons running Genero program is number of deployment licenses.
- Include the maximum number of web service server processes that will run
- Don't forget training, staging, QA, testing, backup, disaster recovery servers
- For developer licenses, it should be one developer equals one development license. Some customers share 1 developer license amongst all their developers, if you do this you will need one deployment license per developer so they can test programs they run.
- For larger numbers and public web, consider using a CPU license.
- To ensure that only customers who have paid their maintenance are able to run the latest versions of our software - Pay your maintenance, you can use latest maintenance releases of our products. Don't pay your maintenance, you will not be able to use the latest maintenance releases of our products
- A maintenance license is tied to an expiry date
- Each version of fglrun, fglcomp executables have a build date based on when they were built on the 4Js servers
- fglrun, fglcomp will only run if they are linked to a maintenance license that has an expiry date greater than or equal to the build date of fglrun, fglcomp e.g version 3.00.04 was build on 17th December 2015, therefore it can only be used with maintenance licenses that have an expiry date on or after 17th December 2015
- Some of our newer products e.g. Genero Report Writer, Genero Mobile are offered to existing Genero developers with license term similar to ...
An unlimited Genero Report Writer deployment and developer license is granted free of charge to all customers possessing a valid and current Genero maintenance license for the server on which they are destined. In the event that this Genero maintenance license lapses, the grant expires and Genero Report Writer licenses can be purchased independently
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What does this mean? - keep paying your maintenance, you can use this product, stop paying your maintenance and this product will eventually stop
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How will it stop - it varies from product but for case of Genero Report Writer, after a grace period, reports will print with a warning message on the first page, and after another grace period, the report will not be produced.
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NOTE - if taking advantage of these free licenses, it is important to not only 1) keep paying the maintenance but 2) make sure you update the maintenance key on the server. We have had instances where users have paid the maintenance but not updated the keys on the server and hence getting the warning messages appearing on their reports. If you want to avoid the possibility of these warning messages appearing, then you will need to purchase separate Genero Report Writer licenses.
- FourJs License Manager (FLM) is an application that can be used to centrally manage your FourJs licenses.
- There is no additional cost with FLM
- It has the added ability of being able to add similar user based licenses together and share them across multiple servers and Genero installations, as long as the total is not exceeded e.g. instead of 80 user license on server A, and a 20 user license on server B, you can have a total of 100 users on either server A or server B
- Particularly useful in development environments where you have multiple versions of Genero - Genero 2.50 pointed at 10 user license, Genero 2.41 pointed at the same 10 user license, total number of users using Genero 2.41 or 2.50 at any one time is 10
- can be used in development and deployment environments - BEWARE it does introduce a single point of failure (the license manager daemon process)
- it is NOT a requirement to use License Manager in production
- if using License Manager to administer a single license on a single server, you are not gaining any benefits of using license manager, you are only introducing risk of single point of failure
- due to commercial considerations, issues with License Manager are not publicized in the Issue Tracker. As a result if you have a suspected issue with License Manager, please upgrade to the latest version before reporting to support
- when upgrading license manager, you may need to upgrade the license controller (FGLDIR/bin/fglWrt) so that your Genero installation and the license manager are using the same protocol to communicate. (this avoids upgrading the whole of the Genero installation)
- Genero Application Server and Genero Studio do not require an additional license
- Customer Code - 5 character code assigned to each unique FourJs customer when they first purchase one of our products
- License Number - 12 character alphanumeric code issued with each purchased license. If a license is changed in any way i.e number of users increased, a new license number will be issued
- License Key - 12 character alphanumeric code issued with each purchased license to be used as part of the activation process
- Installation Number - 12 character alphanumeric code generated by the license process on your server to be sent back to 4Js
- Installation Key - 12 character alphanumeric code issued by 4Js upon receipt of an installation number to be keyed back via the licensing process to formally activate license
- Maintenance Key - 12 character alphanumeric code generated by 4Js upon receipt of maintenance payment
License Numbers - Format Check digit - Numbers and keys will be issued with an additonal check digit that is seperated by a space e.g. TAB#ABCDEFGH X, X is the check-digit. Enter of the check digit is optional 0 vs O - to avoid confusion, license numbers only will not contain the letter O.