Vision software has a distribution model most licensing schemes were not designed for: it ships inside someone else’s machine. A machine builder buys your library, integrates it, images the vision PC, and sells the result to a factory you will never talk to — and your license has to survive that whole journey offline.
Development seats and runtime licenses
The industry’s two-tier model maps directly onto hardware: a development seat is a dongle on the integrator’s desk with the full toolset enabled; a runtime license is a key in the machine cabinet with exactly the functions that machine uses. Same SDK, same key, different records — and the machine builder’s production line can provision runtime keys through your vendor-authorised tooling without ever calling you.
The factory floor never phones home
The vision PC lives on the machine network, behind the same segmentation as every other industrial controller, and stays there for the machine’s twenty-year life. Verification on a KeyNub is local — challenge–response against a secure element on the key — so nothing about the machine’s license depends on connectivity, on your server, or on us.
Per-camera and per-tool tiers
Vision licensing is sold by capacity and capability: camera counts, measurement tools, OCR, the deep-learning add-on. Each is a record on the key, so the machine builder configures a machine’s license the way they configure the machine — and a field upgrade to four cameras is a record write during a maintenance window.
Trained models are the new crown jewels
Modern inspection ships trained networks — defect classifiers tuned on months of production data — and a model file copies as easily as any other. Ship models encrypted and decrypt them through the dongle at load: a lifted copy of the software opens with no brain in it. For a vision vendor this one pattern is usually worth more than every anti-debugging trick combined.
The integration languages
Vision libraries meet the world through C++ and C#, with Python in the training pipeline and LabVIEW wherever NI hardware runs the cell. All four bindings are published with runnable samples.
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