Licensing

What a deployment is entitled to, and until when.

The licence file

A short signed document naming the organisation, the edition, how many machines it covers, until when, and which capabilities are enabled.

sudo diffuse-coordinator licence set ./licence
diffuse-coordinator licence show

licence set verifies the signature and the contents before replacing anything, so a wrong file cannot take a running deployment down.

What it constrains

Machines	how many may be enrolled at once
Term	when the subscription ends, and how long the grace period runs
Capabilities	training, distillation, the fast backend, SSO

What expiry does, day by day

	30 days out	Expired, in grace	Past grace
Serving on /v1	works	works	refused
Requests in flight	-	-	finish, never killed
New jobs	accepted	accepted	refused
Jobs already running	-	-	run to completion
Enrolling a machine	works	works	refused
Certificate renewal	works	works	works
Administration commands	works, with a notice	works, with a notice	refused
Licence install and status	works	works	works
Audit, read and export	works	works	works
Export of your adapters and datasets	works	works	works
Your data on disk	untouched	untouched	untouched

The subscription bites on use, never on giving back what is yours. A lapsed licence stops the deployment from doing things. It never stops you retrieving the adapters you trained on your own corpus, the datasets you imported, or the audit trail you may be required to produce.

Two of those rows are deliberate rather than incidental. Requests and jobs already running are never interrupted: a three-day fine-tuning run killed on the calendar day is hostile and earns nothing. And certificate renewal keeps working past grace, because a node's identity lives ninety days and renews at sixty: if renewal stopped, a fleet would die of expired identities within a month and a renewed licence would no longer bring it back. The sanction for expiry is refusal of service, never the destruction of your ability to return.

Seats

One enrolled machine is one seat. Re-enrolling a machine that already has an identity does nothing and says so, precisely so that a repeated command does not cost a seat. Revoking a machine returns its seat.

diffuse-coordinator licence show
diffuse-coordinator nodes

Signatures

The coordinator verifies against public keys compiled into the binary. A licence signed by a key it does not know is refused by name rather than accepted with a warning.

Development licences exist and are signed with a key published in the product's own source. They are useful for evaluation and for the test suite, and every coordinator that loads one says so in its log on every start. If you are paying for this product and see that line, ask us for a real one.

Renewal

A renewal is a new file with a later date, installed over the old one. Nothing restarts and nothing is interrupted.

We track expiry on our side and reach out before it matters, because a licence expiring on your cluster is an outage you did not schedule and neither of us wants that conversation.

Air-gapped

Nothing about licensing needs a network. There is no activation call, no heartbeat to a vendor, and no online check of any kind. The file is verified against a key already in the binary, on the machine, offline, for ever.

That is not a concession to air-gapped sites, it is the design. A product that phones home to confirm you may use it is a product that decides for you, and that is the thing our customers are trying to escape.