I am very interested in how exactly vBulletin's licensing/customer system works...

I do not have a copy of it myself, so nothing to exactly "test" with... but how exactly does it work? Are you given a customer id? What do you do with this, and when is it required in the future?

Any other information would be helpful!

Originally posted by KandieMan101
I am very interested in how exactly vBulletin's licensing/customer system works... It's quite well laid out at:
http://www.vbulletin.com/order/
http://www.vbulletin.com/license.html


Are you given a customer id? What do you do with this, and when is it required in the future? Yes, they assign you a customer ID and license #. These are required to download the full version and updates as well as to request support.

Since this is posted in "Programming Discussion", I presume you want to know more than this? There's really not much else. They don't "enforce" anything, though they do (or did in previous versions) include code that links to vBulletin.org so they have a record of the IP address you're using the software on.

To summarise

There are two licenses:

1) Owned. You have a valid right to use the software 'forever' but you only get one years worth of upgrades. You can then pay yearly for upgrades (at a reduced rate)

2) Leased. You lease a license on a year by year license. However if you let your license lapse, you have no right to continue using the software on your server.

YOu can only install ONE copy of the software, although I do believe they let you have use a test version too... e.g. for staging servers.

Thanks a lot Rich2k and SROHost... great information, and I will check out those pages SROHost... could any more "general details" be provided?