Licensing for Certificate Manager

1

I have no doubt CTW is currently considering licensing options for the upcoming Certificate Manager, currently in beta. I have been a long time personal user of CTW for Windows instances in my home lab, however I have deployed the product commercially at 8 customer sites so far. CTW has been a fantastic tool over the years, but the limitation of running on Windows has at times been an inconvenience.

I recently set up CM in a docker in my home lab - what an excellent development. This is perfect for environments where there are many VM’s and / or many docker containers, something that has become super common. While there is always another answer, another way, being able to deploy CW in a docker that behaves in a known way is going to become a useful tool in my professional tool belt. I have no doubt my customers will be some of the first to acquire licenses when the product gets released.

I would simply and humbly ask that the good people at CTW consider a home lab license at low or no cost for people like me, who run small home setups, or in my case, a rather dynamic environment where applications are brought up, taken down, configured, broken, reconfigured, all with the goal of learning, so I can ensure what I recommend to my customers is best of breed and stable.

I can absolutely assure the good people at CTW that supporting the home lab will without a doubt lead to the product being recommended into commercial environments, where the real license sales are to be made.

2

Hi Luke,

Thanks for trying out Certify Management Hub and please do provide any feedback you might come up with as you try the app out.

Currently Certify Management Hub (and Certify Management Agent) work in Community Edition mode when unlicensed, and other than displaying text to say the app is unlicensed it will function normally. The purpose of that UI message is really to prompt the “should we have a license” discussion within each organization.

Approx 90% of installs of CCM (the windows desktop app) are the free community edition, so it’s an important part of our user base, licensed or not. As you say, many free users do become licensed,

We are considering requiring all instances to have some kind of license applied, whether a free community/personal-edition-with-no-support license, so we know how many active installs there are and can notify people about urgent updates etc, but recognize this can be cumbersome for trials and throwaway tests etc, so perhaps that could be time-based. Either way we do recognise that home networks and test/trial installs will always be a part of how people use our apps.