I purchased a three-seat license for FredoCorner a while back, and I've migrated over a couple machines since then, from a Legion 15ARH05, to a Surface Pro 7, and now to a Surface Laptop Studio. I (re?)activated the license on my current machine because even though I could have sworn I had used it before on here, it wasn't activated and wouldn't let me do anything. (I actually thought there was something wrong and restarted a couple times because there was no indication it was a licensing issue, it just "didn't work." It could do with a "check your license or buy one" message if you try to use a tool without a license.)

While doing this, I saw that the number of seats taken was 3, leaving 0. It was then that I remembered that I never specifically released the license on my old machines before decommissioning (including formatting the drives and reinstalling Windows) them and moving on. After having some flashbacks of the similarly dreadful iTunes seat limit DRM, I figured there's probably a way to release old machines online. I found the license management page after a lot of hunting around the site, and found the seat release menu, but ironically the only license it will let me release is the one I just activated 10 minutes ago.

Is there some way I can get the old seats released considering those machines are not even under my ownership anymore? I would hope there was a way to release the seats, considering the DRM probably does a phone-home every time you launch it anyways. Even if it were theoretically still activated, it could just invalidate the seat when it next connected.

Maybe it's just me, but unless there's something physical to unplug from the machine like an old-school hardware key, I absolutely never remember I have to go through some process to release the license on an outgoing machine. I just stop using it and license the new machine whenever I start needing to use it on the new machine.