License Deactivation and Transfers

As described in our 4 reasons to allow software deactivation – and how it works blog post, there are 4 main reasons why you may need or want to deactivate a software license on a customer’s computer:

1. The customer may claim to have a dead computer and is asking to activate the software license on a new computer.
2. The customer may not have paid for your software or otherwise broken the terms of your purchase agreement, and you want to terminate the use of your software on their computer(s).
3. The customer may want to legitimately transfer the license between two working computers.
4. The customer has asked for a refund during the warranty period, and you want to make sure they actually stop using the software.

To securely enforce license deactivations or transfers, it is important that you configure your software to require periodic validation with SOLO Server. See these posts for more details:

• The one thing you must do to secure the license transfer process
• Use these 3 steps to validate licenses, protect your profits, and keep customers happy

Once you allow customer to deactivate licenses on their own, we recommend enforcing a limit on how often they can deactivate:

• Are you leaving money on the table by allowing license deactivation?

This stops them from repeatedly transferring a license between computers when they should actually purchase an additional license or a network floating license that is better suited for that type of usage.