Overview

Floating licenses (also known as concurrent or network licenses) allow a limited number of licenses for your app to be shared among a larger number of users over time. When authorized users wish to run the app, they request a license from a license server.

Suppose your customer has 30 employees who will use your app, but fewer than 20 of them use it concurrently. Instead of purchasing 30 individual licenses, your customer only purchases the number of floating licenses required to support the concurrent users.

Floating licenses are usually more economical than purchasing individual node-locked licenses.

How floating licenses work

When your app starts, it requests a floating license from the license server. The license server checks the number of available seats, and if it finds a free one, it leases the license to your app for a specified amount of time. If all seats are leased, the next user must wait until another user's app frees its seat or its lease expires.

Before the lease expires, your app automatically sends a refresh request to the license server to extend it. When your user is done using the app, the app should free the license, making it available for other users.

Hosted vs on-premise floating license server

The two types differ in where the license server runs and the client library your app uses to lease seats from it.

Zombie licenses

If your app stops without freeing its seat, the seat stays leased and unavailable to others until the lease expires. This is called a zombie license. It resolves on its own once the lease runs out, because the server frees any seat whose lease is not refreshed. To prevent it, always free the seat when your app exits.

Borrowing for offline use

A user can borrow a floating license to keep using your app while disconnected. How you enable borrowing differs by deployment, so see the hosted and on-premise pages for the specifics.