It was a cash transaction valued at approximately $200 million. On 1 April 2008 Macrovision's Software Business Unit, which included FLEXnet Publisher, was sold to the private equity company Thoma Cressey Bravo and subsequently relaunched as Acresso Software. The original FLEXlm development team moved on to develop the Reprise License Manager (RLM) at Reprise Software in 2006. Macrovision subsequently renamed FLEXlm to FLEXnet Publisher. Combining features from the Safecast protection system and FLEXlm, FlexNet featured product activation and executable wrapping, supporting floating licensing and node locked licensing models. GLOBEtrotter was then acquired by Macrovision in 2000. Highland's rights to the FLEXlm product were acquired by GLOBEtrotter in 1994 Highland continued as a reseller of 3rd party software.

įLEXlm was originally a joint development by GLOBEtrotter Software and Highland Software in 1988. In this way, for example, a company might buy a pool of 50 licenses but support a user community of hundreds of occasional users of the software (so long as no more than 50 users ever want to use the software simultaneously). A license to use a piece of software may be associated with a specific machine ( node-locked), permitting it to only run on that machine (node in a network) alternatively, a company may buy a pool of floating licenses and these licenses may be allocated dynamically to machines, a license being checked-out when a user begins using the software on any given machine and checked-in when the user finishes using the software. Ĭomputer software can be licensed in a variety of ways. producer /products /software-monetization /flexnet-licensing /flexnet-publisher /įlexNet Publisher (formerly known as FLEXlm) is a software license manager from Flexera Software which implements license management and is intended to be used in corporate environments to provide floating licenses to multiple end users of computer software. Windows, macOS, Linux, and various UNIXes

Flexlm license manager