The strong market position and customer acceptance of FlexLM makes it imperative to support its license models and licensing software in a grid environment. FlexLM has a closed API, is proprietary and based on a simple client-server mechanism
The FlexLM scheme allows for floating licences, which are not bound to a specific host. Rather they are allocated dynamically to arbitrary hosts. Licences then are checked out at the licence server when an application starts and checked in when it ends.
In principle FlexLM therefore is suitable for usage in a grid environment. There are, however major security and identity issues with respect to the access to the licence server in a grid environment. For example the FlexLM software is able to filter legal and illegal accesses based on the host IP, but is not able to grant access on the basis of user/group certificates. This implies that on a grid site an arbitrary (unauthorized) user could check out an arbitrary number of licences once the corresponding licence server is exposed.
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