# Licensecc: binding a licence to the machine it was issued for > Licensecc is a C++ library with a C API that lets a small commercial application check at runtime whether it is running on the hardware it was licensed to, using a signature of the machine. It suits a vendor with ten to twenty customers, and the project is explicit that it is not a licence management system for scale. **open-license-manager/licensecc** — Software licensing, copy protection in C++. It has few dependencies and it's cross-platform. - Repository: https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc - Website: http://open-license-manager.github.io/licensecc/ - Stars: 1,256 · Forks: 374 - Language: C++ - License: BSD-3-Clause - Published: 2026-10-19 · Updated: 2026-10-19 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/open-license-manager-licensecc ## What the library actually checks Licensecc is a copy protection, licensing library and license generator for Windows and Linux, and the description of the project is direct about its purpose. It helps protect the software you develop from unauthorized copies, limit the usage in time, to a specific set of machines, or prevent the usage in virtualized environments, and it is an open source license library that helps to keep your software closed. The core mechanism is a hardware signature. The library can generate a signature of the hardware it is running on and later report if the signature does not match, and the stated reason is that the executable has been moved elsewhere. That is the whole design in one sentence, and it explains both what the library is good at and where it stops. A signature is derived from a selection of machine characteristics, and the library compares the current signature against the one that was recorded when the licence was issued. If they differ, the application is not running where it was licensed to run. That catches the common case of a licence file being copied to another machine, and it catches the case of a virtual machine being cloned, which is the specific thing the feature list calls out. The time limit is the other axis, and it is a different mechanism. A licence can carry an expiry, which is the standard way to sell a year of software rather than a lifetime, and the combination of a time limit and a machine binding is what most small commercial desktop products actually need. The interesting honesty is in what the project does not claim. The README does not say this is unbreakable, and it does not try to. It says protect against unauthorized copies and limit usage, which is a claim about raising the cost of casual copying rather than about making copying impossible. And the positioning line is worth reading as guidance rather than as a joke. It is an open source license library that helps to keep your software closed. The library is open, and the thing you use it to protect is not. That distinction is the entire commercial proposition, and the licence terms are arranged to allow it. ## Four components, and only one of them ships in your binary The project structure is four sub-components, and the documentation is clear about which is which. The C++ library with a nice C API, `licensecc`, with minimal or no external dependencies, is the part you have to integrate in your software, and it is the part you are currently in when you read the repository. The license debugger `lcc-inspector` is to be sent to the final customer when there are licensing problems, or for calculating the pc hash before issuing the license. That is a really useful piece of design. When a customer calls saying the program will not start, the answer is not to ask them to run something complicated, it is to send them a small tool that shows what the library sees on their machine. And the same tool, pointed at the customer's machine before a licence is issued, produces the hash that goes into the licence file. The license generator, `lccgen`, is a separate GitHub project, lcc-license-generator, for customizing the library and generating the licences. So the workflow is not hardcoded in the library. You configure what the library will look for, generate the licences against that configuration, and the runtime library checks against the same configuration. The fourth component is usage examples in a separate repository, which shows various ways to integrate `licensecc` into your project. So the division is: the library checks, the generator issues, the debugger diagnoses, and the examples show the integration. Only the first ships inside your product, and it is the one with minimal or no external dependencies, which is what makes it practical to embed. The documentation describes a comprehensive list of features, and their status is available in the project site, which is the right way to present a feature matrix for a library whose individual capabilities differ in maturity. ## Building it, and the dependency shape The build is CMake, and the prerequisites are listed precisely enough to plan a CI image. The operating systems are Ubuntu 22.04 to 26.04, tested, with others possibly supported, and Windows Server 2022. The compilers are GCC on Linux, and Visual Studio 2022 or 2026 on Windows. The tools are cmake at 3.16 or newer, git, and make or ninja. The libraries line is where the design shows. If the target is Linux, OpenSSL is required. Windows depends only on system libraries. Boost is necessary to build the license generator and to run the tests, but it is NOT a dependency of the final `licensecc` library. That last sentence is the one that matters for adoption. Boost is a heavy dependency, and the fact that it is confined to the build tools rather than the shipped artefact means the library you link into your product stays small and portable. The clone step has a detail worth copying. The project has submodules, and the documentation says not to forget the `--recursive` option: ```console git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc.git cd licensecc/build ``` And on Linux the build is three commands: ```console cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install make make install ``` The Windows instructions are given as IDE steps rather than commands. Check out the project with git, go to Project then cmake settings for licensecc, add `-DBoost_ROOT="C:\path\to\boost"` to the cmake command line arguments, check that boost is found, and build using the UI. The repository structure matches the four components. There is a `CMakeLists.txt` at the root, `include/` and `src/` for the library, a `projects/` directory for the sibling projects, `extern/` for vendored dependencies, `cmake/` for the build modules, a `doc/` directory and a `test/` directory, plus a `build/` directory already present. The documentation tooling is Sphinx, and the `requirements.txt` is a documentation dependency list rather than a runtime one. It includes sphinx with the read the docs theme, breathe, myst-parser for Markdown sources, sphinxcontrib-mermaid for diagrams, sphinxcontrib-googleanalytics, sphinx-markdown-tables and sphinxemoji, plus sphinx-sitemap. The project also carries a `pyvenv.cfg`, which means the documentation environment is a Python virtual environment. The licence is BSD-3-Clause, and the project says it comes with freedom of use for everyone and it always will. ## Who should use it, and who the project points elsewhere The README has a section titled Should I use it, and it is one of the more honest ones you will find. The project is fully open source with no hidden costs or premium tiers. It is a good fit if you have a small to medium size application to protect, if your user base is limited, around 10 to 20 customers, and you can distribute licenses manually, and if your project already uses CMake. And the alternatives section is equally concrete. If you need commercial support or guaranteed response times, see the maintenance status. If you need a full license management system for distributing and renewing licences at scale, that is a different product. The scale threshold is the interesting constraint and it is not arbitrary. A manual licence workflow has a natural ceiling, because every licence is a conversation with a customer and an issue of a file. At ten to twenty customers, that is a few hours a month. At a thousand customers with annual renewals, it is a business, and at that point you want a server, an account system, a web interface and a billing integration, which is a different project entirely. The maintenance badge is the thing to look at before you commit, and it is on the badge row, reading seeking maintainers. That is a yellow badge, and it is worth taking at face value. A library that is looking for maintainers will still work, and the last release v2.1.0 from 2026-08-31 shows recent activity, but the project itself lists guaranteed response times as something it does not offer. The version history also shows the gaps, with 2.0.0 in 2021, 1.1.0 in 2019, and the current 2.1.0 in 2026, so this is a project with an established history and a long gap in the middle rather than a new one. The alternatives named in the project site are the natural ones for the cases it rules out. A commercial licence management service handles the distribution and renewal at scale, and it does not require the customer to run anything unusual. And if the goal is simply to prevent a binary being copied, that is a different problem with different tools, some of which are not commercial software at all. The last point about the library is the one worth remembering. It is a component you link in, not a service you call, so nothing about your users' data or your product's behaviour passes through a third party, and there is no server to run. That is a genuine advantage of the design and it is also why it cannot handle the scale case, because the state that a licence server would hold is exactly the state that this library deliberately keeps on the customer's machine. ## Getting started, and the help channels The project tells you how to start in two steps, and the first one is the documentation rather than the code. Read the quickstart and concepts sections in the documentation, and the documentation describes this as the fastest way to get acquainted with the project. Then look at the examples repository, which shows various ways to integrate `licensecc` into your project. That ordering is a statement about where the difficulty is. The API surface of a C library is not the hard part; the hard part is the model, and concepts is where the model is. A reader who skips it will end up with a library that computes a hash and no idea which hash to ask for. The build documentation is split by platform, with separate pages for Linux and for Windows, and there is a complete list of dependencies and supported environments on another page. For support, the project says to use discussions for questions and help, and to open an issue for bug reports and feature requests, with a pointer to the contribution guidelines before reporting. There is a forum link in the badge row as well. The acknowledgements are worth a glance too. There is a special thanks to Quaoar Workshop for creating a video about the library, with the project noting that they independently produced the content and are not affiliated with them, and that the video provides a nice introduction if you want to get started, with the caveat that it is for version 2.0.0 but most of the ideas are still valid. That is a useful piece of information for anyone starting out. A third party made a walkthrough of this exact library, and the project has blessed it. The version caveat is worth noting, since a video from the 2.0.0 era will not show the current configuration surface. The repository top level also shows the tools of a modern project. There is a `.clang-format` for the C++ formatting, a `CMakeLists.txt`, a `CHANGELOG.md`, a `CONTRIBUTING.md`, a `requirements.txt` for the docs, and directories named `.agents/` and `.qwen/`, which point to the same pattern seen elsewhere in this ecosystem, where instructions for coding agents are kept in the repository. ## Conclusion Licensecc fits a vendor with a small to medium application, a limited customer base of roughly ten to twenty accounts and manual licence distribution, because it solves exactly the case where a licence has to be tied to a specific machine and nobody wants to run a licence server. Skip it if you need commercial support with guaranteed response times, or if you are distributing and renewing licences at scale, since the project itself points you at alternatives for both. Before you build against it, check the maintenance status page, because the README carries a seeking maintainers badge, and read the quickstart and concepts sections rather than starting from the API. The last push was on 2026-09-17 and the current release is v2.1.0 from 2026-08-31. ## FAQ ### What does Licensecc do? It is a C++ library with a C API that lets your application check at runtime whether it is running on the hardware it was licensed to, by generating a signature of the machine and comparing it against the one recorded when the licence was issued. ### What are the components that make up Licensecc? The `licensecc` C++ library with a C API that you integrate, the `lcc-inspector` license debugger to send to customers, the `lccgen` license generator in a separate project, and a repository of usage examples showing integration. ### How do I build Licensecc on Linux? Clone with `git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc.git` because the project has submodules, then in the build directory run `cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install`, `make` and `make install`. OpenSSL is required on Linux, and Boost is only needed for the license generator and the tests. ### Is Licensecc suitable for a large number of customers? The project says it is a good fit for a small to medium application with a user base of around 10 to 20 customers and manual licence distribution, and that if you need a full licence management system for distributing and renewing licences at scale you should consider alternatives. ### What licence is Licensecc under? BSD-3-Clause, and the project states it comes with freedom of use for everyone and it always will. The current release is v2.1.0 from 2026-08-31 and the last push was on 2026-09-17. ## Sources - [License: BSD-3-Clause](https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc/blob/develop/LICENSE) - [open-license-manager/licensecc on GitHub](https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc) - [Project website](http://open-license-manager.github.io/licensecc/) - [README](https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc/blob/develop/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/open-license-manager/licensecc/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/open-license-manager-licensecc