The ionCube Software License Generator allows you to restrict your code domains (including particular sub-domains), IP addresses and MAC addresses. Licensing to a domain is particularly useful for authors of extensions and plugins used with systems such as WordPress and Magento. It means that once an extension is sold it can only be used on that one domain, thus preventing copying, and protecting sales.
MAC address locking effectively allows you to restrict usage to a particular machine. Which is particularly useful for developers who are producing systems for local intranets.
Another feature of the ionCube Software License Generator is the ability to produce time-restricted licenses. This provides the additional benefit of developing subscription-based services or to produce time-limited demonstrations of your code.
The licenses you produce are checked by the ionCube Loader at execution time. Since the ionCube Loader is an extension to the core of PHP, it finds system information before PHP has started to execute. That means licensing parameters, such as the domain, cannot be faked by a PHP script that is run before any other.
Licenses for ionCube protected code are produced independently of encoding. As a result, encoding can be done offline, whilst licenses can be produced dynamically for the domains of your customer. Thus a new version of your software can be released without you having to worry about producing new licenses or having to re-encode for each customer.
That means a new version of your software can be released without you having to worry about producing new licenses or having to re-encode for each customer.
Additional restrictions can be added to licenses as license properties. These can be enforced so that the encoded files have a matching key. License properties can also have associated values that allow personalisation of restrictions for each of your clients.
There are even third-party applications that help you manage the licenses of your customers, such as Maiancube. PHPLicengine can be used to manage ionCube licenses.
