Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago, I wanted to get into autocad again but not pay for the latest and greatest. It was just for my own personal use of playing around and designing things so I had no worries of format compatibilities with other companies, etc. I had gotten a stack of autocad lt 2002 books for free from a professor at the college I worked at, so I set out on ebay to find a copy. Got one complete in box!

When it arrived, I fired up the installer, used the serial, and everything installed without a hitch. I ran the program and it asks to activate online. "No problem," I think, I used a legit serial from a legit copy, I should be fine. What I didn't consider was that the activation server was taken offline (I'm sure the official reason was "cost savings" but "force people to upgrade" fits in there pretty well in my opinion).

So now I had a perfectly good box of software and a stack of manuals for a product I couldn't use for no technical reason other than the company didn't want me to use it.

Damn, not even a decade of keeping their activation servers online by Autocad for their own software? That is ridiculous, it'd be like Microsoft shutting down their infrastructure for Windows 7 activations today.

I feel at a certain point, if you've sold software that calls home and you are unwilling to maintain the servers and there are still people using it, you should hand it off to the Internet Archive or a similar org so they can run it. Leaving users stranded with no hope of using software they're familiar with, have paid for, and have supported is just a bad move.

Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre software, if upstream dies for some reason, your business won't click off tomorrow.

> Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre software

Ironically, this is also why some DON'T use libre software. They question what happens when the maintainers stop.

Being free to choose someone else to pay for maintenance work seems like a pretty good feature. Rejecting Free software on the basis that the original maintainer might stop seems like a veiled statement of unwillingness to actually pay for maintenance, not a statement about the viability of supporting Free software.

Someone should tell them, if you're worried about them stopping GIVE THEM MONEY.

And if nobody else does? Pay their whole salary? Even AutoCAD isn't that expensive.

There is software where a single yearly license costs more than someone's salary.

The problems with these servers though is typically isolated to hobby users who don't have the money to hire people to keep the ancient software working for them.

No, this isn't. If that was your worry you especially wouldn't use proprietary software where the issue is much more prevalent. As others point out, you could pay FOSS maintainers if you wanted to.

Instead, people who don't use X make up excuses as to why not, rather than simply saying they like Y. If you like AutoCAD, use it.

In taking customer feedback it's important to only ask potential customers, not people who'd never use your product anyways. Even if their feedback is honest it won't help with what you're doing.

Which is funny, because in the worst case they can continue the development of the software by themselves, which is virtually impossible with commercial software.

That sounds right, and your experience obviously gives you a negative experience of the manufacturer. But as an engineer in this situation I can relate. If we had phone-home activation I'd probably try to argue that it should be expiring re-enabled every year in the product so that if we abandoned it then users wouldn't be stranded.

The question I'd have to answer is - would this be a net positive? Would it lead to more or less sales? Would we only lose customers who wouldn't buy a new license anyway? What would the cost be of my proposed feature that helps customers in the future?

In our situation there is zero risk of e.g. losing business to open source, so management would likely be deligthted with the idea that users would not be running our old software. In reality we avoid the problem entirely by just selling subscriptions like so many others these days. The software has a kill switch that makes it unusable after the planned release date of version N+2.

Most license key activation systems can easily be run on a $20 VPS these days. There is literally no reason to not keep it running for 40+ years.

It seems like this would be easily defeated by a firewall, or even a simple hosts entry if the registration server is defined by domain name.

The managers of this hypothetical software company would surely complain if their cars were remotely disabled because the manufacturer wanted to sell a new model. Similarly their customers should complain (via the courts) when the product they bought is remotely disabled to force them to upgrade.

As a sibling poster points out, running a license server is a trivial expense and if you require it for your product you should budget to keep it running. It's roughly $400 for a perpetuity paying $20/y to run the server indefinitely.

I completely agree - but hopefully if the management knows what they are doing in 2002 they don't sell a license that gives the buyer perpetual right to use the software (they can't guarantee that so long as the maintenance of license servers is required. Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.)

> Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.

It's a one-time expense if budgeted properly. Buy a perpetuity to cover it. If you ever discontinue the service you can release an unlimited copy of the software and recover the value of the perpetuity.

I bought a copy of Office 2010 Home and Student a few years ago from a brick and mortar store. I tried to install it a few weeks ago and got the message that I installed it too often (which perhaps I did because I only need it once a year and I use Linux, so I always install it in a throwaway virtual machine).

The installer told me to call a number but it looks like they disabled that number and they are currently in the process of setting up a new system. Meanwhile I can't use my legit copy...

I had the same situation. Use their online chat. I chat to a service representative and he was able to give me permission to re-install it.

Expect everything with DRM to have this problem eventually. Start moving to OSS wherever possible now.

What do you suggest as a viable open source alternative for CAD?

I am no expert in CAD software, my only experience is with FreeCAD - and I found it is pretty good for things I needed. Project evolves fast. There are PPAs with up-to-date binaries too.

There is pretty much no free CAD software that can compete with AutoCAD. The problem starts with the DWG format is based on proprietary RealDWG that they license to vendors. Free software will not be given a license.

The problem migrates to AutoCAD being like C++ and having a long list of legacy objects that are never broken.

A competing format was headed by Bentley with OpenDWG but they abandoned it somewhat after RealDWG gave in to giving them the doormat for free.

Bentley has abandoned OpenDWG but the software that is built on it has continued to improve. IntelliCAD is not free, but there are enough companies building on it, that it would be difficult to kill.

My employer is a member of the Open Design Alliance [0] working on IntelliCAD. I work a layer up, building plugins for both AutoCAD and IntelliCAD. Free trials are not hard to find, so you can decide if it will work for you.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance

SolveSpace: http://solvespace.com/index.pl

The UI is really nice. Version 3.0 whenever it comes out is going to be awesome. You may also try FreeCad for things this can not model, but that has its own problems - particularly UI.

The OSS world still needs a full-featured NURBS library that supports trimming. Solvespace does, but the performance suffers as complexity increases.

clearly the solution there was to use the crack.

Sounds like a good impetus to learn how to reverse software!

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