Local simulation feature to be removed from all Autodesk Fusion 360 versions
knowledge.autodesk.com
knowledge.autodesk.com
However once you are a business many of those protections aren’t present. There is an assumption that businesses should be able to sort things out amongst themselves and the court system. However an SME barely has any more power then a consumer going against a giant like Autodesk.
I wonder if the solution wouldn’t be to extend those protections to smaller businesses, and additionally allow reclaiming the cost of any investments in the platform (Training, etc) and other expenses. Your not telling autodesk what they can do with their product, but if they are selling it based on features they are removing, they will be liable to make right anyone who purchased on that basis.
definition of product applies to current billing period only, Autodesk reserves the right to add or remove functionality without notice
But I think they will remove all of it for everyone with 1 month notice.
It's meaningful to discuss what portion of the value was lost in the revision. For almost all users the answer is zero it's just something in their virtual library they will never install again.
Arguably a user who had lost a substantial portion of his expected use might be owed a refund while someone who last played it 7 years ago is not but the matter is too meager to be worthwhile.
When I worked for a .gov we’d have issues like this from time to time, and it was always amusing to see the face of the douche VP of whatever realizing how screwed he was when our attorneys would school them on the various contract provisions they had agreed to without reading.
They’d lay out the basic approach of how they would approach the fraud litigation, and let them know that the “retainage” terms means that the all current receivables would be held in escrow until the matter was resolved.
When will the users learn that SaaS means the software can change at any time out of your control, up to and including not functioning at all, and you will not be able to do anything about it?
Or will their minds continue to be "clouded" by the corporate propaganda?
I think the question of why people will willingly "build on a shaky foundation" is appropriate, especially given the type of software this is.
Fuck Autodesk.
Many Fusion users have switched to alternative CAD programs in last year or two. Many of them started using Alibre products, which have quite good pricing (Atom is great choice for hobby users/small workshops). Too bad it's Windows only (like almost all CAD programs). But I think FreeCAD also increased their user-base, which will hopefully help them grow (like Blender). It's really great software, but still missing some features needed for (more) professional work.
It's hard for companies to move to another CAD software, but some companies are really pushing their users away :D
The main competition is SOLIDWORKS. There's also Pro/E (or Creo or whatever) and NX. I haven't come across Alibre before though - that looks interesting.
I also liked that they don't make any attempt at claiming this is for any reason other than more money. No "oh our new models are too powerful to run locally" or "oh for security reasons" or whatever. Which would be pretty transparent bullshit but I think a lot of companies would try anyways. This literally admits that the cloud functionality is identical, just paid per use.
Imo if you bought the product in this state, fine, but if you bought it before they probably ought to have to grandfather you in forever.
- Corporations do this for recurring revenue, but also because software IP is easier to protect in the cloud where no-one can decompile the code,
- But it’s a hell for customers.
Who would put something of so much value as the original model in the cloud?
Will AutoDesk reimburse you when cloud is hacked and your design stolen?
"I will go back to pencils and drafting boards before I put my entire companies primary assets on anyone else's server." * 1m companies.
Imagine if github owned git and removed the local repo other than the current checked out hash?
There's a lot of options in this space. Ansys, Dassault SOLIDWORKS (though they're trying to push the cloud model, lmao), Siemens. Smaller devs like zw3d which plug into dedicated sim packages (it's not like f360's is that comprehensive).
Why don't people move? It's not like a super free market, but there's a bunch of options in the space.
Solidworks is the monopoly and it was only the insertion of Fusion360 that broke it. Solidworks is so entrenched that they still haven't reduced their prices even though Fusion360 is absolutely killing them at the low end.
> Why don't people move? It's not like a super free market, but there's a bunch of options in the space.
I'd love to hear about them and throw some money at them. Before Fusion360, I knew of basically nothing at the low end.
> Siemens has NX and another tool whose name escapes me.
This is also kinda funny in a non-funny way. Why? Because Solidworks is basically a household name at this point (and has been for a few years).
Solid Edge? Much less so, even though it exists way longer and...
drumroll
Siemens licenses their Parasolid kernel to Dassault for Solidworks.
Siemens is so shitty at marketing their (IMHO) superior product that basically nobody knows it :(
I think they don’t need to market them - but that’s because they’re aimed at a different market segment. The licensing costs for these tools individually are very high, but big companies buy them as a package along with things like TeamCenter. Inertia is very strong so if a company uses a tool, they’re unlikely to migrate unless they’re forced to for some reason.
Because learning new software and workflow is extremely expensive for an architect. As software engineers who learn for a living we sometimes take our learning muscle for granted.
Autodesk is simply trying to find what that “cost” is for their user and keep the total price slightly below that.
It is very analogous to programming if you consider it like rewriting a program designed in Java into C++. Depending on the complexity of the program, you will become proficient in C++ long before you finish the code transition.
I use Siemens NX to design. It would take thousands of hours to recreate all the partfiles we use into a different CAD software. Some of the big guys write programs to make a transition easier (from Ideas to NX), but they are not perfect. They may work for some simple parts, but for more complex things... forget about it.
And now that I've learned it, I'm more likely to pick it over other things in the future. If I got a job with any of this stuff, I'd be leaning towards it as the tool for that, too.
https://solidedge.siemens.com/en/solutions/users/hobbyists-a...
This is like a bad carnival game
EDIT: I know nTopology is expensive, but has anyone tried it or have experience with it? I am willing to spend money on products that are truly productive and innovative.
I talked to some Autodesk guys on a ferry, it's all about like getting the building designed correctly the first time to code. Fixing stuff is expensive. It actually makes sense from that perspective there would only be one company encompassing the problem. But why tighten the internet leash? Internet access is a leash.
There lies one of the reasons it's not just a matter of "push[ing] the open source community"
To create a quality 3D CAD/CAM program takes more than just competence and interest in having a free product. It takes a small core of very talented people with expertise and experience in building complex software, surrounded by a legion of supporters. Kind of like the Linux kernel project.
It's a niche software product that requires significant technical expertise in programming, mathematics, and in UI design. It's nitpicking to debug.
The closest anyone has built is Blender, but that's still a far cry from being Fusion 360 or Solidworks.
GNU has had a CAD program on their wish list for as long as I can remember... going back to 1990 or before.
Unfortunately, the removal of local simulation is more of the same from Autodesk.
The problem with Open source is that although developers are willing to share their time and skills for free, most other professionals just won't do it.
1. Catering to the needs of developers, such that the user community is also the development community.
2. Bootstrapping off of hobbyist users and crowdfunding to keep developers on board.
The second option is how Blender happened. It started out as an in-house tool at NeoGeo[0], then got sold as a proprietary shareware app by NaN Software, which went bankrupt. The fact that it was shareware meant they had a large hobbyist fanbase - it was very cheap compared to professional tools. So people were willing to crowdfund it; they were able to buy the software copyright off of NaN's creditors; and that enthusiasm continued for multiple decades until it became the massive behemoth that it is today.
For us to get a FOSS CAD app we need hobbyist buy-in. That's arguably a far smaller audience than hobbyist CG artists. And even then we have to compete with the free tiers on modern subscription apps. Blender's only competition back in the day was pirating Maya; but FreeCAD and friends have to compete with the cut-down hobbyist license on Fusion 360.
[0] No, not that one
We desperately need a modern open source geometric kernel, but that would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of man hours to build. The “best” and most popular kernel, Parasolid, is 40 years old and had constant improvemen.
FreeCAD/OpenCascade is the best we have, and will have, without significant financial investment to fund development.
The problem is that OpenSCAD is easy to get started and the code-first approach is unbelievably useful - but too simplistic/limited. Meanwhile, FreeCAD is too complex, and often buggy.
There's also CADQuery, which is surprisingly good already. Don't get me wrong, the GUI (CQ-Editor) is unusably buggy. But the Jupyter notebook integration works amazingly well. If I were that project, I would work on a hot-reload, cross platform, standalone viewer only (in the same way people use OpenSCAD often). I would also pay for that, safe in the knowledge that the code produced can't be locked in so easily.
Is it a FreeCAD replacement? For better or worse, no. But it has let me avoid FreeCAD/Fusion360, while finally being free of OpenSCAD shortcomings.
Couldn't you equivalently use any STL/STEP/AMF viewer?
Seems a good choice to me that the GUI is a separate/subordinate project. I suppose it is somewhat necessary to have it at all, easier to gain popularity if you can show screenshots and have a single app 'quickstart'.
I'm not sure. A quick feedback loop is important. With OpenSCAD and CadQuery, you write code that defines the geometry. You then want to see what the geometry looks like, and possibly debug it. For this, you generally want to be able to give certain parts a different color, or opacity, wireframe, etc.
STL is out; it has to tessellate geometry turning it into triangles. AFAIK, it only supports one object. This means a sensible wireframe is out, and so are multiple parts. AMF has similar drawbacks. STEP files might work.
Generally, my understanding is many people write OpenSCAD code in their editor of choice, and then simply save the file. When you open an existing file in OpenSCAD GUI, it monitors it for changes, and refreshes. So this is great.
That said, I misspoke a bit. CQ-Editor is definitely somewhat close to OpenSCAD. It still has a - in my view - unnecessary code editor. But the last standalone release is over a year ago, and I found it to be extremely buggy on macOS. It crashes quite often. Meanwhile, Jupyer-CadQuery [0] works great.
> Seems a good choice to me that the GUI is a separate/subordinate project. I suppose it is somewhat necessary to have it at all, easier to gain popularity if you can show screenshots and have a single app 'quickstart'.
Generally, I think this is true. My personal opinion is I can be productive with something that has a minimal set of features but is rock-solid; over something that has gobs of features but is buggy. That was my main issue with FreeCAD. Ease of installation is another big one. For all it's issues, OpenSCAD gets both of these things right.
Just as long as it 'hot reloads', and then you can configure editor/IDE to compile the {stdFormat} file on save.
No need for the viewer to be first-party (to the language). (If assumption valid.)
Most popular engineering CAD programs are parametric -- you lay out shapes in2D or 3D, and then specify their dimensions and relationships. Parametric modelling makes it much easier to create highly-interdependent geometry, and also to understand or explore the degrees of freedom your design does and does not have.
Also, modelling in brl-cad means typing into a command prompt [1], which makes it much more difficult to figure out what you can, or should, do with it.
What incentive do people have to invest years of their life to do this and then not get a dime back? There is a reason why most commercial software is better than their free, open-source counterparts.
I fell for Fusion 360's siren call years ago... by the time I realized their intentions, I'd made many, many designs in it. Fortunately, I came to my senses and abandoned the account, instead donating the price of 360's license to FreeCAD instead. CAD is a foundational technology. We can't leave it in the hands of some greedy VPs. If you must do business with a vendor of proprietary software, at least choose a company who will see your investment as a mutually beneficial partnership. Autodesk really seems to view your investment as a convenient leverage point to screw you when you're good and vulnerable.
And this is why all this "muh cloud" bullshit is a nightmare world where you, the client, have 0 leverage or rights or any kind of weight. Aside from the astonishingly dumb UX choice of "You always need a reliable network to do anything" off course.
I don't use AutoCAD, so I'm a nobody here, but these sound like pretty important and often-used features to cut (er, transfer to pay-per-use) without _any justification_ whatsoever.
Seems like a great move to finally strangle that golden goose that's been kicking around all these years.
8<---------------------------------------------------------
If I am in the middle of a project at the time of this update, can I delay the Fusion 360 update to solve the remaining tasks on my local machine? You can temporarily pause the update by enabling Offline Mode prior to September 6, 2022. This enables you to delay the update, only until you are prompted to reconnect to the Fusion 360 servers (up to 2 weeks after switching offline). You can find more details on how to enable Fusion 360 Offline Mode here: How to work in offline mode in Fusion 360.
It is recommended to not rely solely on the limited time you are provided by using the offline mode to complete your project. In the event where you require more time after being prompted to log back in, you can explore the cloud solve options, which utilize the same solvers as the local solvers had previously.
These guys have like super rosy estimates of what kind of bill you can present people with, like David Heinemeier Hanssen, figures "hey $20 a month no big deal" but it's like no $20 is a huge deal. They have an image of America where everybody earns $140000 a year and gets raises no problem, and doesn't get fucked out of practically all of it by the tumor industries--housing, medicine, and education. After the mortgage is paid, after the raise is negotiated, after the college degree turns out does not provide that six-figure paycheck, and after the doctor commits malpractice in a disgusting minute way to get recurring revenue from you, tells you a really sleazy lie to get you on the hook--after all that extortion, people really don't have $20 for a software license left at the end of the month.
.
Especially because those tumor industries price discriminate, as we all know tumors tend to squeeze. So it's the realtor trying to fuck you and refusing to show you nice houses you can afford, plus asking 6% commission on a house which of course means he's playing for the other team pumping up the price, telling you to show up with signed checks and shit, and of course blocking development to keep the inventory expensive, they have plenty of time for that. Then the bank extorting you whoops we can't process your mortgage relief act whoops your rate came in 1% higher--banks which can't even compute interest rates correctly, even in Stanford it's so embarrassing, and they just fetishistically want the highest interest rate they can get, so they give you like "incentives" shit, like give you money when you sign the demonic contracts.
.
Which are common in all these tumor industries, they're full of debt full of contracts, full of people staring you down--people on whose faces is imprinting the savage betrayal and harm they secretly do to those who can't pay[1]--and figure out exactly how many thousands they can get out of you. Plus they align with your boss--your boss offers you a ride home, now he knows where you live and can talk to the landlord, make sure you never benefit from a raise. Bosses pay for insurance, and the privacy is just not there, the costs bleed out so if you've had illness you're a liability, also because you can be out of work longer and in a justified way. Plus it's a super important factor, the insurance, because it binds you to the job in depressions so he can be more exploitative--bosses love depressions, get people to fucking work and never even think of asking for a raise--and insurance for employees is more than the wage itself in many cases. Then the final and most tumescent industry, education, actually demands you answer all kinds of intimate questions to figure out how much it can extract from "you" meaning the student's parents, for the benefit of the son, who is the one who actually gets fucked if there's delinquency on payment.
Tumor industries. You can't just jack up your price way above inflation forever--AutoCAD and I would say SaaS in general is about finished with their vendor-lock-in phase--the contracts are signed--now comes the tumor phase.
Adobe and AutoCAD are just the beginning.
[1] Ambulances 100% leave people on the side of the road dying when they get enough info on the patient to know they can get away with it (like someone who's been evicted), if he doesn't sign the digital thing getting on the hook for their $1200 taxi ride. You can see it in their face, that's how they get people to sign, by sometimes carrying out the threats they're implying with their shitty attitude. The whole game is pretending there's a choice when actually you and they both tacitly know you're fucked if you don't. They only have to do it a few times per paramedic--and there's magic spells that allow them to do it, like maybe special places that are OK for dumping the dying like they can do a special diagnosis claim you're fine turn around and leave you back at your house--but they do do it or otherwise people wouldn't cooperate like they do. They wouldn't have a legit coercive stare.
A part of me wants to reimplement the tool holders for ToolWall[1] in OpenSCAD[2] and be done with it with Autodesk forever.
[1] - https://toolwallhq.com
[2] - https://openscad.org
Happy to chat more if you're interested in it.
Just connected to another via this same thread.
I do wonder if there's enough engineers that started in the 00's and are now almost retired looking to work on righting some wrongs in our industry :D
That's a different take on age discrimination in hiring than I'm used to seeing!
Open source software historically treats users as an afterthought (or worse makes really terrible attempts at courting them like GIMP).
Different CAD suites use different terms and have radically different interfaces. There's a lot of (un)learning to do. Go fillet something in Fusion then try to do the same in FreeCAD. Not only is the interface ever so slightly different than Fusion, you have to navigate a minefield of bugs and limitations in FreeCAD. Yikes.
But by comparing Autodesk (presumably Fusion and not e.g. Buzzsaw or Maya) to OpenSCAD you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison. OpenSCAD is a thin wrapper around a CAD programming language, it's an entirely different than something like SolidWorks or Fusion.
The case for hobbyists is a bit different as they're often more willing to try something like FreeCAD that's missing a bunch of features or makes them far more tedious to implement. Try dealing with parameters in FreeCAD. Or, better yet, recreate this:
To be fair, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.
Autodesk has been completely hostile to their customers (because said customers are a captive audience and they know it) since the 90's, so what is happening here should not come as a surprise to anyone.
If you save it via the export as workaround it takes milliseconds to save.
If you save it via the default menu you are in for a 2 minute wait where their cloud is doing something and then it generates the same file.
Absurd.
Basically, pulling features without much communication or forewarning is just not OK.
Part of me wonders about the feasibility of an open source business based around paid support and training of a complex professional tool. I know of cases this works for tools aimed at software engineers, but I’d be curious if that was really attempted with CAD
Solidworks isn't open source, but they provide support and training. So it's possible of open source business to do the same.
They do it for the big cad programs.
As academics, I feel we should put in our best effort to use and contribute back to open-source platforms. It's not crazy to spend the first year of your PhD adding a feature to an open-source package if it will boost your research productivity for the next 4 years. It's also easier to work around limitations when you only need to run one experiment instead of producing a robust product.
[1] Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight, a RPi-sized board with onboard stereo cameras and GPS. The hardware was unbeatable at the time.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core...
Why not make a custom build that connects to a local server? The Air Force can probably pay whatever fee you ask if they want it enough.
Companies that are not based in the US in particular will probably start looking at Solidworks, if they have not done so already.
I'm sure that's not 100% feature-equivalent to the latest Autodesk Fusion, but at least you can run it locally without getting raked over the coals by the software company.
[1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
If affected companies banded together to pay in even 10% of what they currently pay Autodesk towards working with the blender foundation, we'd see it all in FOSS within 2 years.
Coordination problems are hard though. Only time will tell how hard people will actually push back.
https://github.com/hlorus/CAD_Sketcher
https://github.com/EleotleCram/blender-cad-tools
I'm not suggesting that they are ready for professional use, just that I don't think the Autodesk moat is as deep as some might assume, and that if there was a concerted community effort Blender could accomplish those tasks.
They're not even pretending it's some kind of fancy big-computer advantage.
"I know, we'll focus on the incredible compute power that only The Cloud can provide! We can say... 'reduce your capex by leveraging our best-in-class simulation engine. Your existing commodity hardware just got a lot more powerful.', or some such bullshit. Whaddyathink?"
"No go. We tried that with Sims 4, and it just pissed off our user base even more. This move isn't going to make friends; best we just rip the band-aid off and avoid fluffy justifications."
Quite the sales pitch.
I always pick FOSS first, but, even as a hobbyist I find myself limited by the feature set of FOSS options in this space. And I hardly even know what half of the features in Fusion 360’s menus even do.
edit: In the interest of not just whining, does anyone know a competent hobbyist-grade fea/cfd solution? Doesn't have to be free[0], but I'm not going to pay for a license to pay for compute.
[0] I've tried open foam once or twice, but couldn't get a decent workflow put together (model > mesh > sim > results).
Is there a good free/cheap alternative to F360 for me?
I use Fusion 360 to model simple things for 3d printing. I've gotten used to it and think it's great when things work, but have been weary of their cloud and buggy "free personal use" licensing stuff since the start.
I'll check out some of the other programs mentioned in this thread -- SolveSpace, FreeCAD etc. -- but from a first glance it seems they will all take ages to get used to.
Maybe I should try become a Blender god even though IIRC that isn't really set up to do parametric modelling (I have a passing interest in game design etc. so the skill could be useful)?
I'm still hopeful that Blender will become a great parametric modeler. Check out the https://www.cadsketcher.com/ add-on - it's getting to the point where I might take the leap.
I just spent a while in wonder at a node-based parametric design tool for Blender called Sverchok[1] - looks super powerful but wayyyy too much for my 3D printing toothbrush holders and phone stands haha.
CAD Sketcher looks much more like what I'm used to.
Had a look at a recent tutorial and it looks great!
[1] https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/education/soli...
There’s a real need for this.
Semi FIRE, former Linux hacker type with OpenGL experience.
I think the current state of open-source CAD/CAM is a looong way from matching what Solidworks or Fusion 360 can do out of the box.
First off, our sales force is ridiculously massive. We have 8,000 full time sales people (although they get a fancy title like, solutions expert). In comparison, the number of engineers and UX folks who work on Revit is under 200. We're completely sales-first.
Second off, the amount of mid-level managers who have no other dependents besides a manager is astounding. My boss's boss has no other dependents than my boss, and it's the same thing with my boss's boss's boss. Have absolutely no clue what value they add to the org. There's so much political infighting that makes it incredibly hard to get anything accomplished, we have certain teams that refuse to communicate with another team and they literally just go two separate paths instead of following a unified vision.
Third, our top level VP's / executive suite have never used Autodesk products before. I'm not kidding about this. I'm 100% that our new CTO, Raji Arasu, has never used any Autodesk product before, based on meetings we've had. Given her background from Intuit, this isn't a huge surprise, but could you imagine if the CTO at Tesla had never driven a Tesla before?
I'm not sure how we've gotten to this point. The CEO is literally a rocket scientist from JPL, I can't figure out why he's running the company into this direction of extreme greed. Autodesk is a complete monopoly, and many of the people inside this org are extremely comfortable with the moat that Autodesk has built. I'm not.
I'd also love to see the actual data behind their claims of "Companies that install nonvalid software on their network face a 1 in 3 chance of obtaining malware.*"
Not that I'm endorsing pirating software like this in a professional setting.
"Why don't they copy protect that? what are they stupid?"
Everyone in the world (seemingly) had a pirate copy of acad at home for free, and got real good at it, and every small shop that does any sort of drawing even art stuff like sign makers let alone landscapers, architects, urban planers, etc, alllll ended up buying tons of legit licenses because everyone they wanted to hire plus their own selves, all know acad, and no one's even heard of cadkey or whatever that other one was.
I used to tell that story as an example of enlightened self interest, deliberately enabling piracy being not only nicer but also making you far richer than fanatically trying to detect and prosecute every tiny instance of "zomg theft!".
Either Autodesk was never actually that intentionally nice company I thought they were, or it changed.
I have read a few articles from early employees and I think what it really was originally was schizophrenic. It had people with different attitudes at the same time so the company did both good and bad things at the same time, until the douchebags won as they always do and drove the nice guys out.
I will go on investigating FreeCAD, Solverspace and CAD Sketcher for Blender…
I do hope that SideFX (Houdini) stays independent. Things I've heard suggest that they intend to, and I also hope that they continue on their current trajectory - I think the general direction is very positive! Not perfect of course (and not opensource of course, but very open in practice) A lot of very solid dev seems to happen at SideFX, and a lot is communicated about what's happening, and their support (email contact for when things go wrong) is absolutely STELLAR too!
A lot of industries have export restrictions, and non-local storage or use of export restricted hardware designs is a significant federal penalty.
Ansys and abaqus, older competitors than fusion simulation, will have local solves for this reason.
I also think that I have read something that anything you do with the free version is public available but that have to be wrong or I have mixed this up with some other software, or?
And no, it doesn't make your designs publicly available.
I pay for fusion, and this really sucks. I’m happy to pay for a product I use, but I am not game to get nickel and dimed for features that used to be built in.
The software is great, but Autodesk clearly needs some new PMs.
I presume there's rules somewhere where parts for the F-22, or HIMARS can't be hosted on some random companies cloud.
I assume AutoCAD is the closest equivalent to SolidWorks that they sell, but I'm not certain. That's the first CAD software I used- back in middle school, so mid-to-late 1980s. They added 3D support and I think it uses the same underlying code to handle 3D structures. Again, not certain- it's not a product I pay any attention to.
FWIW, I spend a bunch of time in Fusion 360 and I hadn't really done anything with simulation (it's on the bucket list, but not a priority).
(All the cool kids are using Onshape now, but I just can't get excited about a browser app. So I keep using Fusion 360, and honestly, I still like it, even if Autodesk is not a shining paragon of software and social excellence.)
If I were pulling the strings, I’d go all in on trying to convert hobbyists and students- pricing at $100/$150 a year all year round and add a monthly tier for $15/$20. I don’t even mind locking features like simulation behind a paywall- 99% of users designing for 3D printing, 2D manufacturing like laser cutting, and basic CNC machined parts don’t need them (though I’d throw in a few free cloud credits for the value-add, and make them a bit less of a rip-off). What do I know though.
One thing I suspect- there are a lot of people using the free license to make money (which is not allowed), so I guess they’re turning the screws on.. their paying customers? Much easier to just make the software good value IMO.
I don't understand. The free version doesn't have simulation anymore for a while.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20136223
He's just as much of a greedy bastard as any other.
Imagine this becoming a pattern. You have software you need for work, and the company behind it wants more money — so they pick the most popular feature and make it pay-per-use. It’s horrifying.
I hope this fails fast and hard, as a lesson to other companies. I doubt it, though. I ran IT at a big architecture firm 25 years ago, and everyone hated Autodesk then. That hasn’t changed — most architects still hate Autodesk, even if they have to or choose to get value from Autodesk products.
At that point AutoCAD still used dongles for licensing. If you upgraded a license you had to have both dongles plugged in. Some computers with multiple upgrades had multiple dongles hanging off the back, and I had to build custom dongle supports so they wouldn’t fall out and deauth a machine in the middle of someone’s work.
So yeah, even with that history, this surprises and horrifies me.
Why do you think basically every software product coming out these days is "SaaS"? It turns out that "SaaS" is basically equivalent to "we're rent seeking - we won't do more work, but we will rake in more revenue".
My prediction is that we're going to force the learning curve of tech on the general population (also already happening) because just like those who couldn't read were heavily abused by those who could - those who can't host their own software are being abused by those who can.
What is more abusive—choosing to sell your creation on your own terms, or forcing someone else to sell their creation to you on terms of your choosing?
Thankfully, if someone creates something of value, they don’t have to sell it to you if they don’t want to.
E.g., any data, file, or model, etc, should be exportable and in a format that is specified well enough for a competing company to offer a migration path away.
this right will ensure that there wouldn't be any rugpulls.
One only need look at web browser engines vis a vis web standards, all out in the open, and the Herculean effort required to get to the current state of differences between browser rendering, to get a sense of the challenge.
Such specifications also need to maintain test suites with real data and code and reference code to even start a conversation about effective inter-product data interchange.
There's a hassle of changing OS's, but ultimately it's a market in which the must compete.
Of course you could take an open-source approach like Blender, but that's a 20-30 year climb.
Copyright is an invention; if it is being used to grossly undermine ownership rights, then we should reconsider the extent to which we privilege copyright holders, including our current approach of granting state-backed legal enforcement of their DRM schemes.
As long as Congress continues to cash the checks that Walt Disney writes, copyright is an indefinite protection.
Edit:
Winnie 1926, later purchased by Disney
Willie 1928
Furthermore, having the mouse fall out of copyright doesn't actually impact Disney's bottom line all that much, for two reasons:
1. They aren't losing much. You still can't put him on a t-shirt or sell any merch of him; that will infringe upon trademarks that will practically never expire. You are only limited to either direct reuploads of the public-domain material (which is practically worthless save for historical value) or including him as a character in another unrelated new work; and even then you will have to be very careful to only include aspects of him that were expressed in a public domain cartoon. Anything still under copyright casts a long shadow over the public domain[0].
2. The mouse isn't actually their flagship franchise anymore. Disney has since graduated to the FAANG strategy of "Can't innovate? Just buy your competition!". In this case that means buying up Marvel, Lucasfilm, and most of 20th Century FOX to gain access to more relevant - and, most importantly, newer works. Those works will not hit the public domain in any appreciable way for at least another half-century.
[0] My favorite example of this: Public Domain Sherlock Holmes is not allowed to have emotions because that's part of Still Copyrighted Sherlock Holmes.
I've lived basically my whole adult life dealing with this. Works never entering the public domain because of this copyright extension nonsense. Even college professors seem to think copyright is eternal. I had to argue with one that no, I do not need a textbook for a 19th century work. I can just read it on project Gutenberg or anywhere I want.
The EU wanted a single copyright term for their single market, so they picked the member state with the longest term (Germany), made that the EU-wide standard, and then put in a reciprocal extension clause basically designed to force America to go life+70.
At the time Disney was pushing hard into the European market[0] and having uniform copyright rules between two major trading blocks would be a huge boon to them. Keeping the mouse slightly more under their thumb than it could have been otherwise was just a bonus.
[0] Even when it was losing them billions of dollars, such as with the EuroDisney debacle
Ownership of web applications is not governed primarily by copyright law (which is only relevant as it pertains to the front-end portion of a web app that users download to their browser), but rather by trade secret law (with regards to the server-side code) and trademark law (with regards to the domain name).
Neither trade secrets nor trademarks ever expire if the proper precautions are taken—nor have they ever. Your point regarding copyright extensions is largely irrelevant to the question of web applications.
I have a LOT of problems with having all of us enforce copyright for them (at society's expense - mind you) so that they can freaking rent you their product forever.
Basically - I think capitalism is structured to be efficient when you have to produce physical goods, and every copy incurs an unavoidable expense - which can be optimized through competition.
I think "modern capitalism" where the goal has obviously become: Extract as much value for as little cost as possible is an ethical quagmire when dealing with digital goods. The clear goal is for companies to keep the right to make zero-cost copies, and force consumers to rent a copy for an on-going permanent cost.
Where is the end game here? What is your plan when literally every item costs you a monthly charge, and you own nothing? Explain to me how that's not just a more complex form of slavery?
What? This is a non sequitur. Please explain the connection to slavery (as defined as a person is owned by another and has no or few rights).
The theme is that your labor, and the value it produces, is not captured by you. You work, but do not capture the benefits of that work in meaningful and significant ways. This is directly related to "you do not own - you rent". Because that (quite literal) rent seeking behavior is leaching additional capital from you.
If you prefer, or if "slavery" is a term you feel loaded, you can substitute "serfdom" instead. It's also not quite apt - since it implies a tie to a specific geographic location, but it's close.
Alternatively, you might consider this very similar to a person in a "company town" - they work all day at the company, only to be forced to buy literally every item from the only store in town - the company's store. Which, conveniently for the company, charges them roughly their month's wage for housing/food/clothing. They are working and gaining nothing.
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So in this case, what happens when every item you need (not want) to participate in society is costing you a monthly subscription cost equivalent to your monthly wages?
What happens when internet, car, home, phone (and the apps on that phone) are all rented items, that capture literally all of your wages?
I'd actually say that for many lower class folks in the US right now this is already the case - they work 80 hours a week at two full time jobs, and literally all of it simply gets them to tomorrow. Nothing can be saved, there is no chance to "own" any of it. They certainly make plenty of value - it's just captured by someone else.
It's not going to stop there, though - it's going to keep eating through the ranks of our society. You will be free! (please note that your freedom is the choice to rent an Apple or a Google phone). You have choices! (please note that your choices are limited to renting a car from BMW/Ford/Tesla/etc). You will make decisions! (please note that your decisions are limited to selecting whether to rent content from Hulu or Netflix). You can vote for any one you want! (please note that they must be either Democrat or Republican).
Please allow me to offer these questions, since they better represent where my brain is at the moment... What does it mean if a person cannot buy and outright own the tools needed for their work? Is this necessarily bad? Does it tend to be bad? Does it depend on other things?
Your thoughts? (Can you slow down a little? It seems like you jumped to dystopian scenarios quite quickly.)
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* Sorry, it is a vague statement, something that seems to be taken for granted. But this makes me wonder if neuroscientists have made efforts to compare how different brains do conceptual reasoning. Can concepts be visualized in an fMRI? How? Are they represented in ways that have commonalities across people? Cultures?
In some interesting ways - socialism is fairly close to the idea of "a person who cannot buy and outright own the tools needed for their work". Except the moral justification for that system is that the "owner" who is capturing the value is "all of us". Communism is also there, but it's a little more honest that the "state" (in whatever form it might take) is the owner capturing value - and you just hope that the state is doing good things for you, and will take care of you.
In practice though, I think our society is regressing to similar outcomes that were experienced in communist/socialist countries (not good), but the owner capturing value happens to be a corporate entity. Which is functionally not all that different from "the state", it's just even more honest that it has no real obligation to society at large. They carry obligations to their employees and shareholders, but not much else. In theory - they also have obligations to the government, but that requires that the government be functional and powerful enough to enforce that obligation. I think we're seeing that control slip (and not for the first time - robber barons was the term we coined last time it happened).
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But to your point - it's not required to be a negative (in theory - socialism is great), I just have yet to see any case where it doesn't immediately devolve into abuse (see pretty much every communist country in history). It can still work out great for individuals if they happen to be on the right end of the deal, but it rarely works out for society at large.
I'd guess how much it bothers you is probably strongly dependent on how much you value individualism.
"slavery" is even less apt since it implies a tie to a specific person or entity that owns you and controls your every action.
>phone (and the apps on that phone) are all rented items
Is this really something we need to worry about? You can get an Android phone for $100 with no contract. Is there a single app that you "need (not want)" that is paid, much less paid by subscription?
Look - I agree that neither word is an exact fit, but I think this is a misunderstanding of slavery at large, and a view exclusively through the lens of European slavery, and slavery in the colonies (ex: islands and the US).
Historically, slavery is a really complicated thing, and almost every society had some form of forced labor, performed by low tier members of the society - the details of which vary dramatically.
Slavery (outside the narrow scope of the US history of it) is absolutely not "tied to a specific person or entity that owns you and controls your every action".
Ex - Pre-colonial native american tribes had all sorts of forms of slavery, everything from "we're going to sacrifice you and then eat you" to "you have been captured to fill the role of the warrior you killed in battle". In the later case, they were often given duties and responsibilities markedly similar to the person they replaced, and in some cases end up formally adopted by the tribe in question.
Further - looks at places like India, where african slaves were brought over not for manual labor, but for military use (dating as far back as the 12th century). That enabled them far greater social mobility. Just take a look at cultures like the Siddi - West coast african slaves who rose to become rulers in India.
Basically - ditch the high school view of slavery - it's all the rage in the media right now because it's a wonderfully divisive topic in the US, and diverts attention from other serious political matters. But historically - it's very euro/us-centric in tone (and not even all that accurate within those cultures...).
Let me offer a perhaps undesired writing suggestion. Avoid using "obviously". It tends to signal you think it is obvious, yes. We are here on a fairly decent Internet forum, and you should expect some number of people to disagree. When someone disagrees, the word "obviously" backfires: you come across as overconfident. You lost your first impression to persuade.
1. Your stated goal is not obvious. Actually, it is not a particularly useful way to understand company goals. We need a better understanding of corporate goals in order to explain the variation we see.
To gloss over just one way companies vary: not all companies want to seek profit in the same way. Companies vary in terms of their time horizons. Companies having tough times often try to squeeze out more profits in the short run. More stable companies sometimes are willing to take a hit to build market share.
There are many other ways they vary too: risk profiles, market segments, and more. Another example: some companies actively seek to improve their brand even though doing so is expensive and may not pay off right away.
And let's not forget that some founders do have goals other than pure profit maximization. Some focus first on other things, believing that sufficient profits will follow.
Second, while copies may be nearly zero cost, maintenance and support are not.
And look - I'm not even completely disagreeing with you (I'm certainly not downvoting folks in this thread). Particularly -
>And let's not forget that some founders do have goals other than pure profit maximization
This I agree with whole-heartedly. I strongly believe that founder personality has a large influence on companies, but my complaint is that eventually the founder dies or retires, or is ousted. But the company just keeps chugging along, and (particularly for public companies, although this still applies to private companies) the goal of the company changes from "vision of the founder" to "pay the shareholders". And if we're focused on paying shareholders... it's really, really hard to turn down "we make a widget that costs zero per unit, and we rent it for $x, and legally - no one else is allowed to make that widget".
It's just about as profitable as you can possibly be - and that profit enables you to do all sorts of things that are not "improve the company product" to keep that revenue stream. Things like "hire all the engineers who might compete with you" or "Buy all the politicians that might regulate you" or "acquire all the competition that might disrupt you" or "suppress all the uprisings that put your monopoly at risk" or "murder lawyers and journalists in other countries who might expose you". And it works - because they're capturing huge amounts of value in the form of the labor their consumers are forced to expend in renting their product, which they produce for nothing.
Worse - I also agree that companies have differing goals - but they are competing, and you can't really compete with an entrenched monopoly that is legally allowed to produce widgets that cost nothing, but is legally allowed to prevent other folks from producing those same widgets for nothing (copyright/trademark/IP). From the outside it might look like this competition is happening, but by far and large, the larger companies are just buying the smaller competitor.
Even tiktok - it's getting so much flak in the media right now because our tech giants can't buy it (and it deserves it - but so do Google/Apple/Meta, they're all peddling ads and addiction - selling you as fast as they can).
So while companies might start out with different goals - our current system works very hard to force them into becoming profit centers for their owners - who will be the folks who buy them and force the founder out.
> "murder lawyers and journalists in other countries who might expose you"
Wait, did I miss something?
I personally am ok with that.
What if they rent it out to the same tenant for 50 years? I am ok with that but start to question the wisdom of the tenant. What if rent keeps going up even beyond a reasonable mortgage payment? It doesn't make me question the landlord more. It makes me question the tenant more.
Now if you add a wrinkle like the landlord passes a law that no more houses can be built, then my prejudice switches. Or if it is more subtle like you can't build with the same kind of materials, or reuse a concept like footings.
I oppose that kind of rent-seeking. But it's not the rent-seeking to which I object. It's the moating.
Of course, it's hard to build a new house even without moating. I see too often people who just pay rent because it's inconvenient to look for alternative housing. And building their own seems way too hard. Their own creation would never have the bells and whistles of what they are renting.
Wells Fargo is a perfect example. You get cheated and abused and swindled, but you don't leave. Microsoft was an example for a very long time. Intel has been an example. Amazon is in a big way.
"There's no other option," people cry. But of course there is. Regarding Autodesk, FreeCAD is an option. "Not even close!" some claim. MicroStation? "No way." Solidworks? "Well..."
Build your own, rent from somebody else, go homeless, or stay where you are and pay your rent. And if somebody makes it illegal to do anything but the last, revolt. But don't claim there's no other way if you just mean you want to be entitled.
* Edited for typos *
Even if it is just subscription, what is the length of the subscription? If it's say 1 year, you could ask for a refund for the rest of the year since they've changed what they're giving you.
Because living in tent doesn't get you a toilet and loses a lot.
So build your own house! Or pay someone to build you a house. Or join forces with 10 others and build a hostel with decent toilets, or a tent campground with a bathhouse. Move to a different building with higher rent.
Or just sit in your dump apartment, keep paying rent, and complain about the toilet. Yeah, that's the best choice.
What's that? It's a 3-bath that still has 2 working toilets and a great kitchen? It's not a total dump? It's kind of a dump but close to awesome schools? Look, is it worth the rent or not? Stay and pay, or leave. What's that? It costs money and trouble for a moving van? Sigh. It sure does.
Perhaps another analogy would put Autodesk (or any other rent-seeking company) as a mildly abusive partner, with similarly clear options: put up, find another partner, go single etc.
Doesn't mean the mildly abusive partner isn't mildly abusive.
(Clearly Autodesk is withing their rights here, I'm not suggesting otherwise).
A person, sure! A company? I don’t think it holds up. A company has no sense of morality, no career duration, no children or relatives to take care of. It has a duty to take care of shareholders. When the way it choses to do that naturally comes to oppose our ethics, we legislate.
World Economy Fiefdom ;)
That's fine but here the conditions were changed after one's already committed money.
That's a different ballgame altogether and it should be regulated by law - simply because it's intentional exploitation.
Edit: it just occurred to me that this Autodesk case is big enough to become a precedent. If lawmakers and regulators want reasons for updating the law then they should look here. Moreover, the many issues raised here in comments by HN's knowledgeable readership would alone provide sufficient justification for laws to be altered.
I hope those from Autodesk read these comments, it may give them room for thought.
If you have a well established product that dominates its market and exploit your vendor lock-in to say 'hey in 30 days I'm just going to start charging you an additional rent in exchange for nothing, by turning off a feature you may have come to depend on' then you're basically telling your existing customers 'fuck you, that's why.'
They haven't created anything of value in this case. they've destroyed value in order to extract an economic rent. It's zombie economics.
I am reminded of the classic "if you are a pirate this is what you get, if you are a paying customer this is what you get" meme.
If Adobe PS is anything to go by, that's not a worry. :)
0. https://decoded.avast.io/danielbenes/crackonosh-a-new-malwar...
That being said, a small file size doesn't mean anything in the case of most cracks/keygens because you have to give them admin access to your system. Which means it can download and install anything it wants in the background.
Second, you shouldn't be running any proprietary binaries unsandboxed with Internet access. My standard use of Windows is to install a fresh VM, install whatever software(s) I want, kill all network access but for my local Samba server, and then do my work. Lack of updates that pull the rug out from under me is a feature, and when there are features I want it's easy enough to repeat the installation process while watching TV or whatever.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/what-perso...
Perhaps Stallman is more right than wrong.
Last but not least: he lacks the ability to recognize the advantages (if only for implementing his own goals) of perspective-taking, compromise, being physically presentable (ie dressed decently, hair groomed, body clean), the slightest bit amicable/sociable...
....and not doing things that are socially repugnant. Such as threatening suicide when women won't date him (numerous independent accounts of such behavior, mostly with women who were very young), picking his toe cheese and eating it on a stage (there is video proof of this), repeatedly expressing extreme views around sex trafficking and pedophilia (and then when called out on it, nothing but petulance), hosting semi-clothed cuddle sessions on bare mattresses in his office at a university campus office building, and so on.
He's so blind that he can't even see that his continued presence at the FSF in a leadership role has cost the FSF the vast majority of its working relationships with other organizations, free software or corporate. The FSF board is right there next to him; they're so devoted to him that even when almost the entire open source community says "if you won't fire Stallman, we're done working with you", they won't get rid of him.
Stallman and the FSF had been increasingly irrelevant in the thirty years proceeding the whole pedo/trafficking emails and sexual harassment blow-up. Given the reaction from both, they've since become even more irrelevant.
The secondary problem is that everyone's paycheck here depends on him being wrong, so we get character assassination instead.
* Edit: the problems with software licensing which is the primary thing people know him for. See how many bios even mention his software development work, and then see how many fail to mention his free software zealotry. To even assume his development accomplishments are what people are talking about when discussing his public activities is strange even in a crowd of software developers. If he wrote that same exact software for IBM, or even if he had written it for GNU and not worn crazy outfits to software conventions, nobody would be talking about him 'at all.'
You know, the compiler that kept free software running between 1990 and 2015?
The sheer erasure of his contributions would be comical if it wasn't done so maliciously.
As for absolutes, consider deadly poison: how much is okay? None, really-you can be poisoned with a lot, or a little, but you’re still dead.
This is just telling on yourself.
What Stallman does, and all he has claimed to do, is set moral standards for technology. It's not his job to compromise any more than it's the job of a scale to tell you something weighs exactly a kilogram if it's close enough to a kilogram, the difference probably won't matter, you should be grateful for what you have, are you going to throw it away just because it isn't exactly a kilogram, it'll probably work as well as a kilogram's worth for most functions, so did you really actually need an entire kilogram?
At best you're condemning what you believe in for the sake of what benefits you.
At worst you're pretending to think that Stallman's ideas about software are correct (or as liberals say "perfect") when you actually think they're contemptible or dangerous, but admitting that you disagree with the concept of software freedom itself would cause the people who you want to demean Stallman to most to ignore you completely.
The FSF is as relevant as it's always been, and its enemies are who they always were. If they listened to you and both killed the messenger and compromised the message (which seem to be your only suggestions), they would be a non-existent organization.
the most amount of exformation possible
The worst the software gets, the better. Maybe that way somebody not entrenched may have enough leverage to gain some market.