How licensing works
Licensing that can never take you off air.
Every broadcast engineer has a story about a licence server taking something off air at the worst possible moment. Conspect is designed to be incapable of it — and we document exactly how.
The enforcement ladder
Enforcement degrades our conveniences. Never your program path.
- Compliant
- Green badge in the UI and API. Nothing else.
- Grace — ≤14 days
- Lease expired — offline or lapsed payment. Yellow badge, a log notice, an email. Nothing changes on air.
- Lapsed 15–45 days
- Persistent banner; new engine instances won't start. Running ones are untouched.
- Lapsed beyond 45 days
- Small corner watermark on multiview tiles — never on pass-through program — and config changes lock. Running outputs are still never killed.
- Over GPU entitlement
- The engine schedules exactly the licensed GPU count and logs a polite, explicit error for the rest. Never a crash.
- Revoked — fraud / chargeback
- No new lease is issued and the ladder proceeds. Even revocation never hard-stops a live wall.
Evaluation licences run full-function for 60 days — every feature, no watermark, on your own hardware.
The mechanics
One binary and a signed lease.
There are no separate free and commercial builds — every official artifact contains the same engine, and behaviour is driven entirely by a signed entitlement. Commercial mode is a licence key, nothing more.
Monthly heartbeat, 35-day leases, 14-day grace
Our licence server can be down for a month with zero customer impact. That's a deliberate design target: the licence server is allowed to fail; air is not.
Signatures, not endpoints
The client trusts pinned public keys, never the server it talked to. A spoofed licence server achieves nothing — a lease is valid because it's signed, not because of where it came from.
Air-gapped facilities (Broadcast tier)
Fully isolated Broadcast-tier networks use a documented offline path: export a signed challenge file, carry it to any connected device, and return a 90-day signed lease, with an annual signed true-up. Same PKI, no socket.
Legible, always
The UI and API always show exactly what the machine is entitled to and whether it's compliant. No surprises, no hidden state.
{
"licence_id": "lic_7Yp…",
"tier": "broadcast",
"gpu_limit": 2,
"hardware_class": "commercial",
"not_after": "2026-07-31",
"grace_days": 14,
"prev_lease_hash": "b3:9f…"
}$ curl conspect.local:8080/api/v1/licence → tier broadcast · compliant · 29 days to renewal
The fingerprint
Lawful, boring, and published in full.
A licence binds to a weighted hash of stable machine identifiers — read in userspace from interfaces any administrator can see, salted and hashed on your machine. Raw serials and MAC addresses never leave it. No kernel modules, no anti-tamper, no scanning — the source is available, so you can read exactly what's collected.
- Baseboard serial + SMBIOS system UUID30
- GPU inventory — PCI IDs + GPU UUIDs20
- OS machine-id15
- Physical NIC MACs (sorted, hashed)15
- CPU model + socket count10
- Total RAM, bucketed5
- TPM EK public-key hash, if present5
Matching is a score out of 100; ≥70 is the same device. A GPU swap (−20) or a NIC change (−15) never needs a phone call. Bigger rebuilds re-bind self-serve in the portal — three free re-binds per licence per year.
Source-available
You have the source. We know.
Conspect is source-available, so anyone can compile the licensing client out — the build flag is public. We won't pretend otherwise. Build from source and the honour system applies: the same honour system every licence has always been. Run our signed binaries and the software keeps your compliance receipts for you.
That same openness is your escrow: a perpetual licence plus available source means no abandonment risk. If we vanished tomorrow, your wall keeps running and your engineers can read every line of why.
Telemetry is a separate thing entirely: opt-in, off by default, published schema, never co-mingled with licensing — and never media, URLs, hostnames or anything an operator typed.
Licensing designed by people who've been paged at 2 a.m. Compliance should be easier than circumvention.