Is it possible to have some form of licence for custom toolboxes?

I have created a toolbox which will be distributes to our customers. I was wondering if there is an option to have a node-locked licence (or similar) for it to prevent unauthorised use.

Answer 1

[Sharan Paramasivam Murugesan]

Unfortunately, it is not possible to associate your custom toolboxes with a licensing system. One way to prevent users from viewing the source code of your custom toolbox functionality is to p-code the m-files. But this will prevent all users from viewing the source code.

For more info on p-coding the files:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/protect-your-source-code.html?s_tid=srchtitle

[Sunny Talekar]

Thanks Sharan. The files have already been obfuscated. We were trying to work out a distribution strategy for our toolchain which includes a MATLAB toolbox along with some other tools. I just wanted to know if there was a way to associate the same license with MATLAB toolbox as well. Looks like this isn't supported.

[Walter Roberson]

Sorry, Mathworks does not supply any licensing hooks. You could work with a third-party licensing system.

Mathworks uses FlexaSoftware, manufacturers of FlexNet and the FlexLM license manager, which is one of the more common multi-platform software license managers. However, because it is so flexible, sometimes FlexLM gets to be a pain, and on that basis I could not recommend it for small volumes. Now, if you needed to be able to license "features", named users, group licenses, expiry dates... Yes, it is one to be taken seriously.