Machine-tool software never stopped using dongles, and that is not nostalgia. The rest of the software industry moved to cloud activation because it could assume an internet connection. A CNC shop floor cannot — and usually should not.
The shop floor is offline on purpose
The PC driving a machine tool is often the most deliberately isolated computer in the building. Production networks are kept away from the internet because an outage, an update or an intrusion stops spindles turning — and a license check that needs a server turns every connectivity problem into a production problem. A hardware dongle has no server to reach: verification is a local challenge–response against keys in the dongle’s secure element, so the license works the same in an air-gapped cell as it does in the office.
The value at stake is unusual, too. A full multi-axis seat can cost more than the workstation it runs on, which is exactly the price point where piracy stops being casual and starts being organised. Protection that amounts to a serial number and a patched-out if does not survive contact with that market.
Licensing models CAM actually sells
CAM licensing is rarely one product. It is a base seat plus option tiers — 3-axis to 5-axis, turning, mill-turn — plus postprocessors sold one machine at a time. On a KeyNub each of those is a record on the dongle: your software enables what the records say, and selling an upgrade means writing one record with your vendor authorisation, not shipping a different build or visiting the site.
Postprocessors deserve one step more, because a postprocessor is a file your customer can copy. Ship it encrypted and decrypt it through the dongle at run time: a patched executable then produces no G-code at all, because the crack removed the input rather than a check. That pattern — gate the data, not a boolean — is the single most useful thing a dongle adds over any software-only scheme.
Migrating from HASP, Sentinel or CodeMeter
A lot of CAM still ships with keys from product lines that have changed owners several times, and re-evaluating that dependency is reasonable. The differences you would notice with KeyNub: the SDK’s bindings, samples and C ABI header are public and Apache-2.0, so you can read exactly what you are integrating before you buy anything; there is no runtime environment or license manager for your customers to install — the dongle is a standard HID device and the SDK is one library that ships beside your executable; and your customers never create an account with us.
Practically: keep license queries behind one small interface in your code, run the old and new system side by side for a release, and ship KeyNub to new customers first. The public repository has a runnable sample for every supported language, so the evaluation is an afternoon, not a project.
The languages CAM is written in
Geometry kernels and toolpath engines are C++; modern frontends are C#; and a long tail of Delphi and Visual Basic 6 still earns its keep in job shops every day — we treat those as first-class bindings, not legacy afterthoughts. CAD-side automation in VBA is covered as well.
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