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No experience here, but I'll bite. Have the application call home for authorization with an anonymous device fingerprint and a license key set up during installation. It's not too big of a job for an AWS Lambda function or similar if you don't want to run a server. Allow users the option replacing one fingerprint with another when they get a new machine, and rate limit the fingerprint changes if abuse turns out to be that much of a problem.

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Thank you very much, your solution and one by ezekg sounds a lot similar: anonymous fingerprint + service or some lambda function to do some work.

The good part is it is simple and efficient. I can open source the device fingerprint part/server code (or link to a third party like keygen`s policy) and have my privacy policy in place.

The not go good part is I still need a service running ( the core point was the if there is no server there would be no remote logs, so clients have 100% peace of mind )

I might go ahead with the solution in case something interesting doesn't come up. (I was also looking at NFT based approach, where each license is NFT and can be verified on a blockchain)

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