koobas.hobune.stream
How to implement DLL licensing?
I have a DLL I've created for use with unity, let’s call it, Grapefruit, that I would like to license. This license grants the holder, let’s say.. Jack, legal permission to invoke the class library the DLL contains, from his own unity game.
I’d would also like to release some other DLLs myself, for free, like say..Orange, that uses Grapefruit.
Problem/Need: In both these situations, I don’t want the end-users of Jack’s product, nor the end-users of Orange, to be able to access the class library in Grapefruit (without their own license). Obviously, at the same time, while residing on the end-users system, both Jack’s product and Orange WILL need to be able to access Grapefruit.
Question: Is this possible? If so, would I need more than one variant of the Grapefruit.DLL, and how would they be differently coded/differently compiled?
Better yet, is it possible to, somehow, prevent access to Grapefruit, without a proper... I dunno… run-time license code/something better? Getting this license-code when they buy a license, Jack and Orange could then copy/paste it into their source-code, to "unlock" Grapefruit at startup?
Also: is obfuscation necessary, and if so, how would I (and Jack) use that?
Research: I’ve done multiple searches with variants of “DLL licensing”, but I’m not finding useful hits: does this topic have a special term/name I should look-up? (Mostly I just found licensing pages for various software products.)
