IDL 8.6: Licensing and updating

Licensing has been the most controversial change in IDL 8.6. The release notes say:

IDL licensing is now managed through a 3rd-party solution from Flexera software. You obtain the license through a portal hosted by Flexera, then you can choose to activate the license on a license server or on an individual node-locked machine.

This seems like a more convenient solution, but there are a lot of other changes in the licensing for IDL 8.6.

Limits have been placed on the number of instances of IDL running on a machine. For a local (node-locked) license, the number of IDL instances is limited by:

IDL command line or Workbench 4 Execute compiled save code 4 IDL Bridge Processes 16 IDL Task Engine 1

For a served (floating) license:

IDL command line or Workbench 1 Execute compiled .sav code 1 IDL Bridge Processes 8 IDL Task Engine 1

The flexible single user license which allowed people to use IDL at work and at home (or lab) with a single license has also been eliminated in IDL 8.6.

Furthermore, the IDL 8.6 Virtual Machine cannot currently be downloaded from the Harris site. In the past, this has allowed IDL developers to release applications to users who did not need the full IDL distribution, or an IDL license, to run the application.

Complaints resulted in a proposed change for the next release of IDL. IDL Project Lead, Chris Torrence wrote on Feb 1:

Starting with IDL 8.6.1 (hopefully mid-April), we will make the following changes:

An IDL user will be able to run an unlimited number of sessions on their machine. In IDL 8.6 the IDL license was tied to the MAC address + install location + process ID, so each process ID would consume a separate license. In IDL 8.6.1, the IDL license will be tied to the MAC address + install location + user id, so multiple process ID’s will consume just a single IDL license. This change will apply to the IDL command line, the IDL Workbench, and the python bridge, on all platforms. This change will not apply to ENVI or other Harris Geospatial products. There is no policy change for “flexible single user” (other than allowing multiple IDL sessions on one machine). If you need to use IDL on two machines, you should contact Tech Support or your sales rep for options. IDL Virtual Machine will remain unchanged from pre-IDL 8.6 we just need to tie up some lose ends and release it.

IDL 8.6 also has an automatic check for updates (you can turn off with the “IDL_UPDATE_CHECK” preference) that will tell you when an update is available.