The licensing problem is not the same everywhere. A CAM seat on an offline shop floor, a plugin in a recording studio, an instrument that sells its options separately — each fails differently under cloud activation, and each has its own reason hardware licensing never left.
KeyNub is a USB-C license dongle with a published, Apache-2.0 SDK and bindings for twenty-five languages. The pages below describe licensing as it actually works in the industries where a dongle fits best: the constraint that rules out phone-home licensing, the licensing models people really sell there, and which language bindings you would use.
| Industry | What makes it different |
|---|---|
| CAM & CNC | Shop-floor PCs are offline on purpose, and a multi-axis option can be worth more than the workstation running it |
| CAD & BIM plugins | Your product lives inside someone else’s application, and the real leak is seat overuse, not cracks |
| Industrial automation & PLC | Air-gapped OT networks, twenty-year machine lifetimes, and toolchains where VB6 and Delphi still earn money |
| Machine vision & inspection | Software sold inside machines: development seats, runtime keys in the cabinet, and trained models worth protecting |
| Measurement & test | The instrument is the platform; the options are the product — and LabVIEW is a first-class citizen |
| Automotive diagnostics & ECU | The most cloned software category there is, used from vans and pits where accounts do not work |
| Medical software | Locked-down clinical networks and a quality system that documents every component you ship |
| Scientific & engineering | Floating lab seats without a license server, and solvers whose physics can ship encrypted |
| GIS & geospatial | Field laptops offline for weeks, and data sold by the region that copies more easily than code |
| Audio plugins & music software | Studios that resent accounts, and license checks that must never touch the render thread |
| Broadcast & media | Software judged by uptime, on media networks that are closed on purpose — licensing must never risk air |
| Video surveillance & VMS | Everything is sold by the channel, installed by integrators, on networks that must not phone home |
| Simulation & training | Qualified devices with frozen configurations, on networks where cloud activation cannot go |
Whatever the industry, the integration is the same afternoon of work: verify the dongle is genuine, open an encrypted session, read your license records — or decrypt the data your product genuinely needs, so a cracked binary loses its input rather than a check. Every supported language has its own page and a runnable sample in the public SDK repository.
