Software protection & licensing has always been a topic that I was interested in. Serial Key Manager (skmapp.com) is my recent system that provides developers with a strong licensing solution as well as payment integration, analytics (to analyse the way users interact with the software), and soon the ability to detect unwanted usage based on the data.

The way to Serial Key Manager started in primary school (year 8) when I first built Key Builder. However, the most successful system, SKGL (a part of Software Protector) was built in the beginning of high school. To sum up:
1. Key Builder – checksum based
2. SKBL (part of Serial Key Builder) – pattern based
3. SKGL (Serial Key Generating Library) – information based
4. Serial Key Manager – (licensing as a service) – online based (with support for signed activation files).

Interesting facts, at least so I think! 🙂

* Licensing Systems in .NET (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/764610/Licensing-systems-in-NET) – an article I wrote to give the reader an overview of different approaches out there to create a serial key generation algorithms.
* Software Protector (SKGL) was mentioned in a Pluralsight course by Fabian Deitelhoff: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/licensing-dotnet-applications
* An article/interview about SKGL by Jonathan Allan: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/12/SKGL
* Generally, I’ve seen developers talking about SKGL on many forums such as StackOverflow and Quora.
* SKGL is used in several companies, and there are other systems (more adjusted to a certain case) that are based on SKGL.

Technologies behind Serial Key Manager:
* C#, ASP.NET, MS SQL, MySQL, Apache (on Azure and VPS).