Rash thoughts about .NET, C#, F# and Dynamics NAV.

I love to work on open source projects, but from time to time I have my doubts. My friend Daniel Nauck created a wonderful open source licensing project (see my blog post) and now we had to see this:

I am not a lawyer and rebranding a tool might be permitted by the MIT license, but seriously what are they thinking?

They even removed license information from the source files.

// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
// included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

It’s really ironic to violate the license of a licensing tool, but please don’t be that guy!

"Portable.Licensing is a cross platform open source software licensing framework which allows you to implement licensing into your application or library.

It is targeting the Portable Class Library and thus runs on nearly every .NET/Mono profile including Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store App, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Mac and XBox 360. Use it for your Desktop- (WinForms, WPF, etc.), Console-, Service-, Web- (ASP.NET, MVC, etc.), Mobile (Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android) or even LightSwitch applications."

[Project site]

Yep, you read this correct. This project gives you a free licensing tool for all .NET/mono platforms including stuff like Android and iOS. It’s hosted on github and already on nuget and the Xamarin store, so it’s pretty easy to use – even from F#.

Create a license

There is a really good documentation on the github project page (and there is even a sample implementation for a License Manager app), but just to give you a small glimpse:

Make sure to keep the private key private and distribute the public key with your app.

Validate a license

So try it out and don’t forget to thank Daniel Nauck for this awesome new tool.