"Licensing tool" brings to mind things like what Adobe recently got
into hot water over -- it was, more or less, spyware. Simple serial
number type stuff is not what that term brings to mind for me. Even
that, I'd say, is unnecessary and user-hostile, though far less so
than more elaborate copy protection schemes. Plenty of commercial
software has been released in history that did not use any mechanisms
like this at all and could easily be copied, yet sold enough for the
company selling it to survive and make a tidy profit. In fact, studies
have shown that the ability to get copies for free not only doesn't
significantly depress sales of such software, but may actually
increase them, as people who would not pay anyway get copies, and some
of these recommend it to their friends, or network effects kick in
such as occur if the "freeloaders" produce documents unreadable by
other software. (Pirated copies of MSOffice are thought to have
actually contributed somewhat to M$'s bottom line by such indirect
mechanisms during the nineties.)

Ultimately, this stems more generally from the fact that "freeloaders"
on a nonrival resource don't have the negative impact of freeloaders
on a limited resource.

Specified? No. Implied? Perhaps. The OP being warned of the
consequences of using user-hostile methods will do no harm if he never
intended to, and may be of benefit if he did, but changes his mind as
a result of the recommendation not to use such methods.

Other people reading this may also find something useful in this.

That's good.

Which, given that over a week has passed now without further posts by
Ravi, seems unlikely, for better or worse.

(Odd -- Joe Attardi being polite and not very confrontational? Maybe a
positive sign. :))