A transparent and evolvable licensing object service

If we put aside any controversy that could surround the issue of licensing a piece of software, we are faced with actual technical problems to solve in order to regulate the use of protected software in a non-intrusive way. A licensing service allows software producers to control the access and use of their products, and enables the customers to pay only for the software functionalities they use. In this paper we present a CORBA licensing service that is transparent to the end-users and that can easily evolve to adapt to changing licensing policies. Design and implementation issues are discussed. Experimental results are provided.