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Product key on a Proof of License Certificate of Authenticity for Windows Vista Home Premium. A product key, also known as a software key, serial key or activation key, is a specific software-based key for a computer program. It certifies that the copy of the program is original. Product keys consist of a series of numbers and/or letters.
A product key is required to proceed and use Windows 95. In one form, product activation refers to a method invented by Ric Richardson and patented (U.S. patent 5,490,216) by Uniloc where a software application hashes hardware serial numbers and an ID number specific to the product's license (a product key) to
This table lists for each license what organizations from the FOSS community have approved it – be it as a "free software" or as an "open source" license – , how those organizations categorize it, and the license compatibility between them for a combined or mixed derivative work. Organizations usually approve specific versions of software ...
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on redistribution.
Since that time, other computing technology firms have adopted the phrase "key server" to be used interchangeably with "software license server." [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It is the job of a software license server to determine and control the number of copies of a program permitted to be used based on the license entitlements that an organization owns.
Software crack illustration. Software cracking (known as "breaking" mostly in the 1980s [1]) is an act of removing copy protection from a software. [2] Copy protection can be removed by applying a specific crack. A crack can mean any tool that enables breaking software protection, a stolen product key, or guessed password. Cracking software ...
There are potential weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. For example, a simple implementation might define a function to check for the dongle's presence, returning "true" or "false" accordingly, but the dongle requirement can be easily circumvented by modifying the software to always answer "true".
Software asset management is a comprehensive strategy that has to be addressed from top to bottom in an organization to be effective, to minimize risk. A software compliance audit is an important sub-set of software asset management and is covered in the above referenced standards. At its simplest it involves the following: