This highlights a common problem these days in the software industry. Locking software down to a single computer is bonkers. And is an increasing problem for me. ItÂ’s like buying a car and being told you can drive it only on one road. I work on several computers depending on what IÂ’m doing and where I am, and find this means of license control incredibly inconvenient. In the good old days weÂ’d use dongles. Which were ideal beacuase they allowed any driver to drive the car on whatever road they wanted. But for whatever reason dongles are a rare find these days. Some software I use (e.g. Autocad) uses software licensing which works over the web and allows me to install on as many computers as I like, but permits me to run only one instance of the application at any one time. Like the trusty old dongles this also works perfectly well. Some other software I use also provides for this form of licensing, but the vendors charge a disproportionately large premium for the privilege (IÂ’m not sure whether Mathematica offers this option). I donÂ’t understand why the premiums are so high - if I buy a car, itÂ’s my car and I can drive it on any road I want or even permit anyone else to drive it on whatever road they want without having to hand over more cash to the vendor.
In the context of Mathematica, I personally would welcome a move towards more flexible licensing arrangements which would allow me to run the software on whatever computer I happen to be working on at a given time. And at no extra cost. To a degree Mathematica Online caters for this. But that service incurs additional charge and, for many applications, running over the Internet can be unusably slow.
Appreciate this rant may be a little off topic, but the question highlights a real bug-bear for me. And if anyone from WR is reading, maybe itÂ’ll stimulate some disucussion/action.
All the best,
Ian