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
Expiry	after which enrolments are refused
Capabilities	training, distillation, the fast backend, SSO

Checked at enrolment, not per request. A licence that expires does not interrupt a request that is in flight, does not stop a model that is serving, and does not take a cluster down at three in the morning. What it stops is adding a machine.

That is a deliberate trade. Software that stops working when a purchase order is late is software an operations team learns to fear, and fear is not a commercial strategy.

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.