| Overview > Licensing FAQs > What is Licensing? |
Licensing is a mechanism used to protect intellectual property by ensuring that users are authorized to use software products.
Licensing is not only used to prevent illegal distribution of software products. Many software vendors, including ComponentOne, use licensing to allow potential users to test products before they decide to purchase them.
Without licensing, this type of distribution would not be practical for the vendor or convenient for the user. Vendors would either have to distribute evaluation software with limited functionality, or shift the burden of managing software licenses to customers, who could easily forget that the software being used is an evaluation version and has not been purchased.