A piece of data installed on the your License Server that allows you to run a specified number of Houdini products.

Licenses are created to be installed either the computer itself as a node-locked license or onto a single license server, to serve licenses out onto the network.

Users sometimes mistake a License for a Token. A license just means that you are allowed to serve/use a certain product. A license may have many tokens. "Token" means that "x" number of copies of that product are able to be run at the same time on different machines (unless the License is a workstation license).

For example a License of Houdini FX may have 10 tokens. This means that this particular License of Houdini FX may be used on 10 machines simultaneously.

There are several types of licenses:

• Server license
  This allows the machine to serve licenses. This is automatically generated when a Product license is installed for the first time.
  This license begins with the SERVER keystring.
• Product license
  This is the main type of license, which can be for any of the Houdini products. The license includes a token count, IP mask and expiry date, among other things.
  This license begins with the LICENSE keystring.
• Upgrade license
  This upgrades an existing product license to a newer version of Houdini. e.g. upgrade 9.0 to 9.1
  This license begins with the UPGRADE keystring.
• Extension license
  This extends the expiry date of an existing license to another date sometime in the future.
  This license begins with the EXTEND keystring.
• Increment license
  This increases the number of tokens of an existing license.
  This license begins with the INCREMENT keystring.