Believe me when I say that we would LOVE to make use of the EA native floating licence mechanism. But Sparx don’t provide and API to use it (as of the current version 10).
So we had to create our own mechanism, as this is what our customers said they wanted, and they also said there were some aspects of the EA approach they said they didn’t like.
So, there is just one key, shared by many users, and the key ‘knows’ how many people can use it at the same time. So you can put the key onto your intranet for anyone to use.
Also, the key knows that it should release itself if it hasn’t been used for just 10 minutes. This is made deliberately short, so that you can have the largest number of users sharing the one key.
..so we really have thought about this!
Also, please feel free to post comments on the Sparx site, encouraging them to make their licence service available: we’ll change to use it in a heartbeat.