Landscape licenses

Landscape’s main licensing mechanism is Ubuntu Pro. For Landscape SaaS accounts, the Ubuntu Pro license is already included in your subscription. You can also get a free Landscape SaaS account with Ubuntu Pro, which allows you to manage up to 5 machines for free. Most self-hosted Landscape accounts also use Ubuntu Pro.

For more information on Ubuntu Pro subscriptions, see the Ubuntu Pro documentation, the Ubuntu Pro Client documentation and How to attach your Ubuntu Pro subscription. The Ubuntu Pro Client is a command-line tool that helps you manage your Ubuntu Pro subscription.

Users with older versions of Landscape (or offline deployments) may use our legacy licensing mechanism. This older method involves manually downloading a license.txt file and applying it during the configuration process.

Ubuntu Pro subscription

To use Ubuntu Pro with Landscape, you must be running Landscape Server version 23.03 or newer, and Landscape Client version 23.03 or newer. We have the following guides to help you get started:

  1. How to attach your Ubuntu Pro subscription

  2. How to enable Landscape in the Ubuntu Pro Client

After you’ve enabled Landscape, Landscape will detect your Pro entitlement via the Pro token and create a license for your machine.

(Legacy) License.txt method

For the license.txt method, you get your first license.txt file from Canonical and manually upload the file to your server: /etc/landscape/license.txt. You’ll need to re-upload your license every time you renew, but you can download your new license in your Landscape account from https://landscape.canonical.com/account/<account_id>/self-hosted.

Note that new license.txt files become available on their start date. For renewal customers, the start date is the day after your old licenses expire.

License types (classic web portal)

In the classic web portal, you can view the number of seats used per license type for each computer from the Licenses tab.

Here’s a summary of the different license types in Landscape and what they indicate:

  • Full: License for a physical machine using Landscape SaaS

  • Virtual or Container: License for a VM or container using Landscape SaaS

  • LDS: License for a physical machine using self-hosted Landscape (self-hosted equivalent for Full)

  • LDS-Virtual: License for a VM or container for Landscape self-hosted (self-hosted equivalent for Virtual)

  • Pro: License for any client machine that’s attached to Ubuntu Pro under an active contract (Physical or Virtual)

    • These don’t require the license.txt file to be installed or have available seats on the Landscape server

    • Requires landscape-client 23.x or higher to report the Pro attachment information to the Landscape server