What Is a Concurrent License?
A concurrent license limits how many sessions may use a product at the same time. It measures simultaneous use rather than the number of people who could use the product or the number of computers on which it is installed. A floating seat pool is a common way to enforce that limit.
Count the thing you sell
A ten-user team may need three concurrent seats if no more than three people use the application together. That is different from selling ten named-user accounts or three permanently registered machines. Define what starts and ends a counted session, whether one user may run multiple sessions and what happens when the last seat is occupied.
Make allocation authoritative
A client-side counter cannot coordinate several computers. Ask a trusted service to allocate a seat atomically, then use the returned lease as the authority for that session. In PermitCore the floating lifecycle uses checkout, heartbeat and checkin. The application must handle the unsuccessful checkout path instead of continuing as if a seat had been granted.
Plan crashes and renewal failures
A session can disappear without a clean shutdown. Lease expiry prevents an abandoned seat from remaining occupied forever. Heartbeats show continued authorized use, but a failed or denied heartbeat is not a fresh grant. Test process termination and connectivity loss, then verify that sessions stop or expire according to the documented deadline and the seats become available again.
Do not confuse concurrency with monthly usage
Concurrent occupancy is a current-state limit. Device activations describe installations, and an activation usage pool describes hosted usage accounting. A customer can stay under a concurrent limit while creating new device activations. Explain these separate concepts in the product offer and use the matching server controls for each one.
Common questions
Are concurrent and floating licenses identical?
Concurrent describes the limit being sold. Floating describes borrowing and returning seats from a shared pool. They often appear together, but the words explain different parts of the model.
Does installing the software consume a concurrent seat?
Not necessarily. A seat should be consumed at the defined licensed-use boundary. Make that boundary explicit in the application and sales terms.
Can I enforce concurrency using only local storage?
Local storage cannot reliably coordinate independent devices. Use authoritative allocation and bounded session evidence.