License Revocation Terms

The permission ticket and revocation ticket are exchanged between the software vendor and the customer to fulfill the license revocation. When your customer requests a license revocation, you generate the permission ticket and pass it on to your customer. The customer applies it to the target machine and obtains a revocation ticket. Finally, the two tickets are matched to verify that the specified actions were executed. This provides you with proof that the customer performed the license revocation as requested.

This section explains more about these concepts.

Permission Ticket

A permission ticket is generated by you (the software vendor) and passed to the system administrator (or directly to the customer) for execution on the License Manager host or the standalone client machine. The permission ticket is an approval to perform the revocation operation on a machine. The license revocation operation disables the targeted licenses. These licenses cannot be re-installed on the same machine.

The following are the important characteristics of a permission ticket:

>A single permission ticket can be used to revoke multiple licenses for a specific software vendor on a specific machine.

>Software vendors can revoke only their licenses and not those of any other vendor.

>For network licenses, a permission ticket must not contain more than 15 operations.

>For standalone licenses, the length of a permission ticket must not exceed 65,535 bytes. The number of standalone licenses in a permission ticket are dependent on the size and type of licenses included in the permission ticket. This in turn depends on the selected license attributes and their values.

>A permission ticket typically contains the following information:

•Locking code information: To ensure that the permission ticket is valid only on the targeted machines, the ticket contains the locking information (locking criteria and locking code). A locking code enumeration is allowed to deal with multiple instances of a locking criteria. Starting with v8.5.5, it is also possible to include locking information of multiple License Managers (up to 11). This is useful in scenarios where license revocation is required on License Managers in the redundant pool.

•Time stamp: The time stamp of the permission ticket to be generated.

•Transaction ID: The transaction ID to uniquely identify a permission ticket to be generated.

•Custom-defined software vendor data: You can specify any string consisting of up to 384 alpha-numeric characters. The same string will be reflected in the revocation ticket. You can use this data to verify that the revocation ticket returned by the customer was generated for the permission ticket sent by you.

•List of licenses to be revoked.

•Deferred revocation grace period (added starting with v8.5.3)

NOTE   If you do not have a requirement for your customers to obtain permission to revoke, you can generate local permission tickets on-demand within your application by using the Permission Ticket Generation library.

Revocation Ticket

A revocation ticket is generated by the customer and is then passed back to you for verification. It provides you with a tamper-proof record that the license operations defined in the permission ticket have been executed (for example: revoking one or more licenses).

A single revocation ticket is generated for a permission ticket, regardless of the number of operations defined in the permission ticket.

For details on how permission tickets and revocation tickets are generated, refer to the topic License Revocation Workflow.