A few years ago, I had decided that I was going to go full-speed into building my own products. Do not get me wrong, I still have that dream and continue to try, but other like everything else in adulthood, other priorities constantly get in the way. One of the first things that I thought about was how to implement copy protection and do license enforcement for my products. Most off-the-shelf products that we use today involve the user receiving some sort of license code or unlock key that the customer is required to enter into the program in order to unlock features. I originally went with a third-party solution to implement this type of functionality, but after a bad customer experience, I dropped that vendor and decided to roll my own. Yes, I know that approach is full of danger, but that is what I decided after looking at the options. In this first post, I tackle the first part of a software licensing solution: generating the product license keys.

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