Runtime Licensing

A runtime license allows you to run an IDL application that cannot display the IDL Workbench or IDL command line and which cannot compile .pro files. This type of licensing offers developers who have smaller customer bases the opportunity to buy single distribution licenses as they are needed, paying a small fee for each license. The license is either a node-locked license tied to the specific machine on which your application will run (which means you will need to obtain information about your customer's machine), or a more costly but less restricted floating license that will run on any machine of a given platform.

Note
It is beyond the scope of this manual to discuss the creation of Callable IDL applications. See Callable IDL (External Development Guide) for details. Note that applications using a runtime license must set the IDL_INIT_RUNTIME option when calling the IDL_Initialize() function, and must call IDL_RuntimeExec() rather than IDL_Exec().

When using runtime licensing, you can distribute licenses to your users in two ways:

If you wish to distribute a licensed application to each customer, you can perform the necessary licensing steps for each license you purchase and distribute a ready-to-run application to each customer. This saves your customers from having to perform the licensing themselves, but forces you to create separate distributions for each customer.

If you would rather create a single unlicensed distribution that you can distribute to all your customers, you can purchase a license for each customer and provide that license along with the information necessary for the customer to license your application.

See Obtaining and Installing Runtime Licenses for information on obtaining and installing runtime licenses for your Callable IDL application.