General

“Network Named Licensing” is a  FlexLM licensing format that dedicates a certain amount of licenses to predefined people in the organization. This type of licensing is typically cheaper than simply applying ‘INCLUDE’ restrictions on floating licenses in the FlexLM Options file.

How it this done ?

In this method, a number of licenses for a specific Feature are marked in the license file’s INCREMENT or FEATURE line as “USER_BASED”. This is done per license pool (marked as ‘asset_info’ indices). See a customer’s Matlab example below:

INCREMENT MATLAB MLM 31 01-jan-0000 XX XXXXXXXXXX

VENDOR_STRING=vi=0:at=276:ae=1:lu=300:lo=NNU:ei=XXXXXX:lr=1:

HOSTID=ID=123 USER_BASED=5 DUP_GROUP=UH sort=90 asset_info=123

ISSUED=XXXX BORROW=720 NOTICE=product=MATLAB SN=123

SIGN=”XXXX XXXX … XXXX”

In the Options file, a group containing exactly 5 users is defined:

GROUP NNU_MATLAB_USERS User1 User2 User3 User4 User5

Further down the Options file, an INCLUDE line is added, to reserve the licenses for users User1,…,User5:

INCLUDE MATLAB:asset_info=123 GROUP NNU_MATLAB_USERS

Restrictions

Using the Network Named Licenses (“USER_BASED”) imposes restrictions on editing the Options files; Customers are restricted by agreement not to make changes to the Options file within a period of agreed length. The rationale behind this restriction is that applying frequent changes to the Options file will effectively turn the Network Named License into a Floating license, which is more expensive.