Where is the new licensing system going to leave me?

Whenever I work remote I bring a laptop with me or I just work on the in-house rigs via portable drives. I’d never leave a temporary setup up and running on a remote machine with or without my dongle. Having my DAW license there is one thing but then all the plugin licenses too? No way I’d leave any of that on there, even if it were locked by a hardware key. License managers for plugins sometimes hold more personal info than you’d realize.

In this scenario (in lieu of using a secured user account on that computer that would lock anyone out of my licenses and projects) I’d either ask the studio to pay the relatively trivial $600 for their own Cubase license for that machine (though most any studios would already be equipped to that capacity) or I’d sell my second license to them in case I was worried about being tied to a potential bad actor and continue to use that computer with my projects on a removable device.

Unfortunately none of that works in my scenario.

I still lament the loss of the dongle to a certain degree, and yeah there are definitely scenarios like yours and tons of different setups out there that still benefit from it, but in this day and age the new licensing system is a huge gift to 95% of us. That doesn’t make it any less difficult for the remaining 5% though.

My mediated wish is that system link could be updated to feature single license authorization, so you could bring your laptop which is already authorized and connect it to another studios DAW via ethernet and verify, and then you have an effective system link setup.

Or, similar to above, doing a system link auth like above, would grant a 24hr use on the studio computer.

Personally not upgrading until all the Steinberg stuff i use is moved over, otherwise whats the point.

If that takes two years, then I may just move over to DP or S1, depending on how they develop during that time frame. I’ve been trying the latter lately and kinda liking it.