Opinions on Macromedia's Flexnet successor to Flexlm

[Sailor_EDA]

Hi everybody,

I've been working on several flexlm targets lately and recently visited Macrovision's (well they bought Globetrotter) website where I read that flexlm is not longer supported and instead they're promoting a new product called FLEXnet. I personally haven't run into any applications that use this form of licensing. Searching Google on flexnet doesn't bring up too much either - especially no tutorials on cracking.
Has anybody in this forum had any experience reversing FLEXnet? Does it use the same routines as flexlm? Are there any similarities? I'm just curious and wanted to see if anybody else here knew more about it.

Sailor_EDA

Well, although FlexNet is coming, in my opinion, FlexLM has a long way to go. So I believe it doesn't make much sense to study the FlexNet for now.
In most cases, it is not the better performance, better security, but the cost of the transition.
A typical cycle of the business is, develop and maintain, then over again. The company will protect their investment in the current product, also the maintenance cost will be a great consideration.
We had an example here, one company upgraded there Flexlm license format, and that result in two version of the product had to be maintained in parallel, which is another cost for them, also, their customer not happy. Not every custom want the latest software, some of them just stick at the old version of the software which they had been using for years. What shall we do about that, the customer is the god.

[Sailor_EDA]

But do you have any idea what the differences are between Flexlm and Flexnet? I couldn't find out much from the website - there's a whole lot of market speak and no many technical details. The one thing I did manage to gather was that the local license model is obselete and flexnet is moving towards an online activation model - I'm not sure of this and thats why I wanted to hear if anybody else knew what the new features were.

[tom324]

To those interested in FlexNet: I have just upload FLEXnetLicensing.exe to the FTP. Hopefully, it will not get deleted this time

Tom

[tom324]

Next version of VmWare is likely to be protected by FlexNet.

h**p://groups.google.com/groups?q=flexnet&hl=en&lr=&scoring=d&selm=423655f9.0410281515.237dafa8%40posting.google.com&rnum=7

Tom

[Sailor_EDA]

That is interesting. Thanks for following up on this. Now I know which application I should be anxiously waiting for next to analyze.