Hello,

I have a question regarding the runtime license for the Raspberry PI SL.
When reading about the license in store it says: "Licensing via CODESYS Softcontainer is strictly linked to the selected hardware."
I assume this applies to all supported Raspberry PI models.
When reading about CODESYS key (for license it says the following under disadvantages with Softcontainer:
" - No transfer of the license to another device
- Loss of the license in case of a defect of the device"

So for my case; Lets say i have a Raspberry PI Zero with a license in softcontainer, i do an apt update/upgrade of the raspberry pi os and something goes wrong and i have to reinstall the OS on the device, will the license then be lost?
The question i ask is because i had an incident like this in the spring of 2020 where an update destroyed the boot partition of the SD card making the system unbootable and i had to burn a new OS image onto the SD card. It would be a pity to have to invest in a new license in that case.

I suppose there are no ways to export the license from the softcontainer as backup during an update?
What about DD? If i make an image of the SD card before update and if it goes wrong i simply flash the update back - would the license still be intact?

I try asking here in the forums first if someone knows. Thank you.

Thank you for the fast response!
Looks very positive.
I would never have thought to look in the german section of the forum, my german is very slim at best.

usually you'll find this information in faq.codesys.com:
https://faq.codesys.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1310825
but this is actually down due maintenance.
You should find license update files in:
c:\ProgramData\CODESYS\Licenses\XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXXX-XXXXX\00000000SN_of_our_PI.WibuCmRau
With this file you could relicense your device..

I will check out that faq when its back.

So if i understand it right, once you apply the license its locked to that unique device or are you able to use it with another same type device?
Related to this, you will not be able to upgrade from - lets say a pi zero to pi 4 with the same license?

Sorry for the many questions, i just want to plan it out right before buying a license.

Just to chime in my two cents. I have had my fair share of issue's with soft containers, migration, SD Cards dying etc etc. This caused me to lose my softcontainer license more then once. After many struggles I decided to stop stressing and losing time on such things and I bought a hardware dongle and since then I never had such issues again. Just plug and play! Plus the license is dongle locked and not device locked in contrary with softcontainer based ones. So when you upgrade your hardware, you can simply plug in the license too.

For me this is a no brainer, I don't even consider using soft containers anymore, only hardware based ones. ultimately the choice it's not up to me but I would advise you to spend just a little extra on the hardware dongle.

Ps
you can easily add extra licenses, like IIoT Bundle later on to the dongle, so that is a plus also. Beware that you don't mix workstation licenses with SL licenses though!
For that I suggest using separate dongles. One for your workstation which contains the workstation licenses (Codesys Professional Edition, STweep etc) and the other dongle obviously containing the runtime Single license (SL) and other runtime related SL licenses like libraries and such.

Yes i feel more and more that a key might be a good insurance for this.
Unfortunately i cant check the price in store right now (no price info during christmas holiday it seems) but on US store it said $45 so i guess that roughly translates into €45 without VAT. So suppose i would have lost one license or upgraded hardware it would be break even - thats not much of a gamble.