FLEXlm was originally a joint development by GLOBEtrotter Software and Highland Software in 1988. Highland Software's Scott Holmgren and Robert Hartman, partnered in rolling out this new method for software licensing in Silicon Valley, California. With Hartman's role as VP of Sales and Business Development, sales efforts quickly gained traction and early adoption for pioneering this software method to embed FLEXlm software into several hundred of Silicon Valley's leading software company's products including, Sun Systems, Symantec, and Reed Hastings and Tom Siebel's early software tech companies. FLEXLm quickly became recognized as the software industry's de facto standard globally for license manager software. Subsequently, Highland's rights to the FLEXlm product were acquired by GLOBEtrotter in 1994; Highland continued as a reseller of 3rd party software. GLOBEtrotter was then acquired by
Macrovision in 2000. Combining features from the Safecast protection system and FLEXlm, FlexNet featured
product activation and executable wrapping, supporting
floating licensing and node locked licensing models. Macrovision subsequently renamed FLEXlm to FLEXnet Publisher. The original FLEXlm development team moved on to develop the
Reprise License Manager (RLM) at Reprise Software in 2006. On 1 April 2008 Macrovision's Software Business Unit, which included FLEXnet Publisher, was sold to the private equity company
Thoma Cressey Bravo and subsequently relaunched as Acresso Software. It was a cash transaction valued at approximately $200 million. In October 2009 Acresso Software announced its name change to Flexera Software and FLEXnet Publisher was changed to FlexNet Publisher. A July 2011 announcement said that Teachers' Private Capital, the private investment department of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, had agreed to acquire a majority stake in Flexera Software from Thoma Bravo, LLC, a private equity firm. In 2020, Flexera Software rebranded its supplier division as Revenera, which currently markets the product as FlexNet Publisher. ==Issues with bootloaders==