Software licensing: A slight change in scope
In the current series of articles I’ve been talking about development of a system to enable premium wordpress plugins to be protected by licenses. While working on the design and going through a brain storming session yesterday with a colleague I had two small realizations.
The first is that from the beginning I have planned to keep the WordPress coupling separate from the main licensing API. In fact, I haven’t planned to include any WordPress specific or shopcart type features in the API. This provides me with some benefits. One is that it keeps the focus of the licensing system on licensing only, not on how or where it will be used. It also makes the API more general and flexible.
The second realization should be rather obvious. This is a software licensing system, not just a WordPress plugin licensing system. I’ll be changing the focus of this series to reflect that more general use case.
Once the plugin system is complete, I’ll then go through a series of specific integrations, including WordPress, PHP, Python, C#, etc.
Even though the titles of the articles will change to software licensing, we’re still working on the same project. We’ve just make the important realization that a more general solution is possible and even desirable.