Instrument software has a business model most industries envy: the platform ships once, and the options — analysis modules, automation interfaces, export formats — are where the margin lives. Licensing here is not an afterthought bolted onto a product. It is the product catalogue.
The dongle is the option list
On a KeyNub, each purchasable option is a record on the dongle, and your software enables what the records say. Selling an upgrade means writing one record with your vendor authorisation — no site visit, no reflash, no special build. The same key carries counters that your software can read and increment, which turns metered business models — a pay-per-analysis tier, a bounded evaluation — into one API call instead of a bookkeeping subsystem.
And the strongest protection this industry can use is also the simplest to describe: put the data an option genuinely needs — filter coefficients, correction tables, model parameters — into your installer encrypted, and decrypt it through the dongle at run time. A patched binary then does not produce wrong license behaviour; it produces no numbers at all, because the input never existed on the machine.
LabVIEW and MATLAB are not an afterthought
A large share of measurement software is written in LabVIEW, and most licensing SDKs leave those users to work out the Call Library Function nodes themselves. KeyNub ships a dedicated LabVIEW binding — its own header over a flat API designed for exactly that calling convention — and a documented sample. MATLAB and Simulink are covered including MATLAB Coder output, Python for test automation, and C++ and C# for instrument frontends.
Calibration labs and instrument PCs
Accredited labs run controlled environments where machines are imaged once and left alone, and the PC inside an instrument is effectively firmware — nobody is installing a license manager on it, and nobody is letting it online for activation either. A KeyNub is a standard HID device: no driver, no service, one library deployed with your application. That is the entire footprint your qualification documents have to describe.
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