Grasshopper plugin licensing

Grasshopper Developer
1

Hi everyone,

I have some specific questions about Cloud zoo and licensing a grasshopper plugin. The background of my question is that I would like to sell a GH plugin and thus want to have a basic license system.

my question: Are these assumptions correct?

  1. Cloud Zoo is meant for Rhino plugins and you need to be registered as an issuer and your plugin has to be signed. Furthermore you have to have a basic server running 24/7 that tells the Zoo server if a key is valid (1,2)
  2. there is no equivalent cloud-zoo system for Grasshopper plugins. I could create a Rhino plugin though that uses Cloud Zoo, saves the lease to a file which is read by grasshopper on load to check the validity.
  3. Paid GH plugins normally come with their own Licensing system ( eg. Public Key encryption), and there is no established way to handle the payment system and key distribution.

Thanks for any clarification!

2

Probably check the Karamba plugin.

They have a component to activate a license separately purchased at beginning.

(Purchase from them, and then manually activate it.)

But recent versions somehow switched to Rhino’s license system?

3

hey,
thank you for the karamba reference, I looked through their documentation and it looks indeed like they are using a combination of a rhino plugin that handles cloud zoo and a grasshopper plugin that gets then the lease handed over. Of course they do not share any details on how to implement it – would be interesting. I actually tried this but it looked like the c# context is not shared between rhino and gh. So I am wondering how they are forwarding the lease to gh, maybe it is a simple as saving it to a file..

4

did you see this topic:

5

thanks, yes I did and I posted in a new thread because I am unsure if my understanding of the current cloud zoo system is correct (1./2.) and also the linked thread is now 4 years old and I thought the system might have changed.