The New License Key System

From Codekana-Key.dat to the new text license

Starting with Codekana 1.5 and ViEmu 2.5 in April 2010, all Symnum products use a new license key system. The old system relied on a license key file for each product, called Codekana-Key.dat (RegKey*.dat for ViEmu), which had to be manually copied to the installation directory. The new one relies on text licenses, which have to be pasted into a license-key entry dialog.

How to get started

To get you up to speed, if you bought a ViEmu or Codekana license in the past, you are entitled to a new-style license key. No matter when you bought it, this license will work with ViEmu 2.5 and Codekana 1.5. You just need to visit the new customer area, enter the email you used for the purchase in the password recovery mechanism, and use the credentials you will get by email to log into the site. Once logged in, you will be able to download the new-style license keys.

Please use the support form if there is any trouble with the process.

The rationale

There are three main reasons for switching to this new license key system:

First, using a plain-text license rather than a binary file allows reading the content, and avoids the need to manually copy a file. Believe me, even copying a file can be a source of time-consuming customer- and support-time in this age of Windows UAC shadow files and folders.

Second, it was also important to have a system for which it wouldn't be so easy to implement a keygen. With the new asymmetric-cryptography based system, it is in principle quite hard to implement a key generator.

But third, and most importantly, we wanted to be able to actually establish a sensible business model for upgrades. Although we have only offered one year of free upgrades since the release of ViEmu on July 2005 and of Codekana on July 2007, we have never implemented any check for that limitation, and all upgrades have been free to all existing customers. Although this is great at face value, the end result is that it removes the business case for implementing upgrades, and at some point it diminishes the resources that can be invested to improve the product. It was becoming painfully obvious that we needed to actually start charging for upgrades to be able to dedicate the needed resources to new versions.

This is something we wanted to address for the next stage of Codekana, and the new license key system and customer area are the tools to do it. We've kept our products up-to-date and improving for years. When this transition is over, we will be best prepared to provide still many more years of valuable improvements and customer support.

We still love providing great value for money, and we will make sure our pricing is established accordingly.

Thanks for your help and patience during the transition, we hope all this effort will result in better customer experience with Codekana and ViEmu in the future.

Your feedback

You can use the support form to let us know what you think, we'll be happy to listen to it!