Developer’s corner

OpenLM is becoming a development platform

Currently, we support about 50 different license managers, and now we would like to give you the opportunity to interface the license manager you are using into our platform. We offer to expose your extension to more than 1000 of our customers worldwide in many different ways and promote it based on its value for our customers.

Business model

You will be able to publish your extension using any of the following models:

Open Source
for free

Provided as is, no official commitment to
provide user support

Closed Source
for free

Provided as is, no official commitment to
provide user support

Closed/Open Source
for a price

Developers required to detail their support methods and availability

We intend to allow customers to rate a developers’ support service level in the near future.
However, there is also the option of OpenLM’s Support Team taking this responsibility for certain cases, so don’t hesitate to discuss this with us.

Developers might want to implement license enforcement for their extensions. There are multiple options:
1. Provide contract-based licensing (good as a start)
2. Implement your own license manager
3. Use the OpenLM License Manager (Availability: Q4 2020)

Interfacing License Managers

A. Interfacing by using the Generic License Server Interface

The most simple method is to use our Generic License Server Interface.
Using this method, the developer needs to use their existing license server interface and convert the data to the OpenLM Generic License Server Interface format. Learn more

New License Server Interface

OpenLM Broker
Reads license server information in many ways:
1. Read a file (formatted by the developer)
2. Read standard output (command-line output)
3. HTTP GET

OpenLM Server

B. Interfacing by developing a license server plug-in

Developing an OpenLM Server plug-in is more complex but provides higher-level capabilities. Using this method, the developer will need to implement the OpenLM Server plug-in interface and provide a DLL (dynamic link library) that will be dynamically linked to the server software.
This integration method is not yet available but will be in the near future.

Code Examples

Supporting other capabilities

OpenLM encourages developers to add functionality to our platform using the API. While license managers cannot be interfaced using the API, it does allow developers to interact with client applications and reports.

OpenLM API

Since the first version of OpenLM published in 2007, a comprehensive API has been provided for developers. In the beginning, this was an XML-based, non-standard API. After that, we provided a SOAP API.
We have recently started developing a modern REST API, which is replacing the XML-based and SOAP API. Going forward, this will be the only – yet a better – option available to developers.

Next step

Let us know what you would like to do. You will be able to discuss with one of our developers directly and decide what is best for your software and business.