Binions protects its licences with defence in depth, not DRM. The licensing system is designed to stop casual abuse — copying an install to a second machine, sharing a licence file, or bulk-installing a single token — while staying honest about its limits. It does not try to defeat a determined attacker who has root on their own hardware, and it never phones home with your data. Think of it as several independent, lightweight checks that each make casual copying inconvenient, rather than a single unbreakable lock.
Honest by design. No licensing scheme that runs on a customer’s own machine can be unbreakable, and we don’t pretend otherwise. These layers raise the effort of casual copying; they are not a guarantee against a skilled adversary with full control of the host.
Each binion is licensed by a one-time token, and several mechanisms work together so that a token can’t simply be copied around:
The licensing unit is the set. Licences are counted per complete installation — the full set of daemons on one host — rather than per individual daemon. See The set model for how that maps to pricing and activation.
At start-up, each daemon runs a licence check. How strictly it acts on the result is controlled by a single setting, and the behaviour differs between the current alpha and a production-style configuration:
| Mode | What happens on an invalid or missing licence |
|---|---|
| Warn-and-boot (default in the alpha) | The daemon logs a clear warning and starts anyway. You can install, evaluate, and run Binions without being blocked while the platform is pre-1.0. |
| Enforce (opt-in) | The daemon refuses to boot without a valid licence. This is the production-style posture you turn on when you want the check to be binding. |
Alpha default is permissive. Today the licence check warns and boots — it will not stop a service from running. Don’t rely on it as an access control during the alpha; treat it as a heads-up that a licence is missing or stale.
In normal use these mechanisms are invisible: you activate once, and your host quietly re-verifies in the background. They only become noticeable when something legitimately changes — for example, you migrate to new hardware (a new fingerprint), restore an old backup (a retired token), or stay offline past the grace window. If a daemon complains about its licence, the cause is almost always one of those, and the fix is straightforward. The License problems page walks through each symptom. For how licence enforcement fits into the wider picture — the firewall, sandboxing, and secrets handling — see the Security model overview.