type of licensing, effect on running offline

I have followed this forum since day one, even though I wasn’t an owner yet on day one. I’ve read virtually every thread in that time that has dealt with the issue of licensing and the many heartfelt comments on it. In all that time I have never worked offline, but tomorrow I am planning to. And I have just now spent a lot of time re-reading all those old threads. And I’ve discovered, rather to my surprise, that as long as all goes well and I don’t need to access anything that requires an internet connection, I’ll be fine. (I don’t use the dongle method and never have.)

My question is this: if an installation using an eLicense on the hard drive can work offline, why does an installation that uses USB dongle have to have it plugged in to run? If the presence of the licensing information only matters when the software is being installed, as several threads have stated, why does it matter when the app is merely running? I can’t seem to get my head around this discrepancy. Or perhaps there isn’t one and I’m just not getting how the license actually works.

Not that it matters for tomorrow, evidently, but I’m very curious.

–Len Bassham

The dongle (or the hard disk) is where the license is stored. There is no license info on your computer when the license is inside an USB key.

I use soft-elicenser for Dorico pro and Wavelab elements, and a dongle for Cubase Pro, Steinberg plugins, VSL, and so on.

At any time Dorico runs, a license must be present. In case of Dorico that license can be either stored on the USB dongle or on your hard-disk on the so called Soft-eLicenser.
The advantage of the USB dongle is, that you can carry it around and use Dorico on several computers. With the Soft-eLicenser you can only ever use it on one computer.

To be clear: you never need to be connected to the internet to run Dorico, whether you have the license on the Soft-eLicenser or a USB-eLicenser. You need an internet connection to activate the software, but once it is activated, there is no online component to the licensing whatsoever.