It falls under the Australian Consumer Protection under misleading or deceptive conduct.[0] A lifetime licence marketed as such cannot be withdrawn let alone with EULA/TOS presented after the purchase.[1] Probably could also get your money back from the retailer/autodesk too if you cannot use the software with your lifetime licence.
Are people/orgs who file such complaints legally protected from retaliation? For instance, might Autodesk respond by giving complainants a full refund and a lifetime ban from their products?
It would likely fall under "unconscionable conduct" which is illegal under the ACL.
I would imagine it would difficult for them to prevent individual licences being sold through their retail/online mechanisms.. You would have more limited protections if >100,000 in licence fees, and they may or may not have an enterprise programs for those purchasing that many licences. But where they engage in retaliatory behaviour they could be sued and through discovery determine if they refused to engage with you or jack up the prices in retaliation for a lawful complaint. As you can imagine this would be expensive but... you would also likely be at a scale that could afford such litigation.
Are businesses able to claim under Consumer Protection in Australia? In the Netherlands a whole lot of consumer protections do not apply when buying as a company
Some of the protections do apply to business purchases such as section 18 of the ACL which relates to misleading and deceptive conduct and section 29 regarding false or misleading representations. Businesses, will, in some scenarios (they need to meet the definition of consumer under the Act) also have access to consumer guarantees found under s51-59 which provide some of the stronger remedy options including full refunds.
I just got into 3d printing as a hobby a few months ago and this has been my take away from their offerings as well. I use TinkerCad for most things; I'd like to get into Fusion 360, but I'd be a little afraid of learning a bunch about that software only to have more and more of it become out of reach behind licenses that don't make a lot of sense to buy as a hobbyist. That said, the products look great and seem to have everything a creator might want, so it definitely makes sense for pro shops to license and use.
The skills in these tools are transferrable. The designs not so much. Basically There's a way of thinking about and solving problems in these tools which is common, same as solving things in programming languages is similar but different and maybe different names. Annotations, lambdas, record types, functors they all have different names in different languages and commas and parens are used differently but when you learn one you get better at learning others. Another analogy is that it's a lot easier to learn to ski or snowboard when you can do the other one already than when you can do neither (even if you feel worse cause you know you can do better).
The hard part is if you build real ip up in these things that you lose when you get rug pulled. Or have no way to backup. F360 let's you export more complicated formats. But they all let you make stls which are a pita to reverse int drawings but you can.
It took me 50 hours to learn solid works, my first tool so I could kinda make what I wanted. Inventor took 3 to get used to. F360 an hour. The cost goes down.
Pick one your friends are using and design things.
Try openscad if you're more of a mathematical mind. Try blender if your an artist. Those are different yet still you're making things.
If you mentioned what you wanted to make I can point you further. There's many options.
Thank you for this reply! I'm really just getting into the design side of things now and started with some basic around-the-house stuff I could clobber together in tinkercad. I'll keep this in mind and try not to get bogged down on the 'what to start with' as much :-)
Not to condone any illegal activity from my point, but my personal approach to deceptive and consumer hostile business practices is using the software but not paying for it.
I used to think that way regarding Windows/VB6/Photoshop/Lightroom. It's like expressing your hatred for the Ku Klux Klan by signing up for their newsletter. That'll show them!
Looking back, it would have been more productive to develop proficiency in and give money/support to any underdog competitor.
Onshape is DOA for us- if Onshape goes away, so do your designs. They must know this is a huge issue, but still they provide no way to download your full work.
OnShape is pretty good, but I tend to think even hobbyists should be allowed to have private designs. That's a really weird and uncomfortable limitation that keeps me from recommending it to other people.
For a non-commercial setting I would never touch anything autodesk. You can clearly see how f360 was changed from maker-friendly price to essentially the same price as a professional cad license within a few years with a clear directed strategy to capture the market. I might still be ok if you consider it includes cam/sim, but again only in a professional context. And make no mistake, the software is cloud+subscription only. f360 doesn't allow you to work on assemblies when offline, or export meshes, and some other arbitrary restrictions that make no sense except to limit offline mode.
If you have the money, and you're fine with windows, I would suggest alibre with the offline license as one of the few options available.
I've bitten the bullet and went with a mixture of freecad/openscad/cadquery/solvespace for my hobby designs. It's more work due to the limits, but zero regrets.
The F360 businesses strategy is to sell subscriptions to companies. The free and cheap tiers are a lure for their target market which they're gradually reeling in. Don't get personally invested in it for fun unless you can sustain the financial investment.
What you learn in any decent 3D CAD software will be easy to translate to another one. Fusion 360 is a great package, but it's not because it has particular features that don't exist elsewhere. You can learn CAD on Fusion and leave it for another package later.
What you'd lose are your designs however. 3D designs don't convert well.
But currently there is no 3D CAD software that is good for mechanical design and has a good and free license for hobbyists.
So many things come to mind with that one sentence, it's mesmerizing. I don't have a lot of direct exposure to Oracle, but I remember grief with Adobe and Autodesk products dating back to the 80s.
My dad's company was light manufacturing. They used AutoCAD for various things and my dad became proficient enough that he started wanting to use it for various projects at home. They used Aldus (eventually Adobe) PageMaker to design their catalogues. Both were ridiculously expensive large applications with a pretty solid lock on their respective industries. For the kind of catalogues they printed, they were required to provide the files in some format only PageMaker could produce and for their plays -- .DWG files.
I'm not sure how AutoCAD was actually licensed[0]. But much like Adobe's products, AutoCAD was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000-$1,500 and because a price tag like that means "a lot of people will pirate it", they required attaching a special device to the parallel port (a "License Dongle") in order to start the application. Before I was old enough to "step in and solve the problem", my Dad would just take the dongle home with him on the weekends.
Generally speaking I don't think a single piece of software generated more profanity in my home than AutoCAD did. It started when he brought it home the first time. He'd dropped $4,000 on an 8088 clone (built by a local shop) with a 10MB hard drive. We lacked the free space and he'd come home with a full height 20MB drive. I remember my Dad with a screwdriver trying to get the old drive out / new drive into this tight, steel case[1] about every 2-4 minutes -- yelling some brief 4-letter word-combo. I don't remember what it was that I needed in the office at that moment but my mom intercepted me on my way and said "you'll want to stay out of there for a little bit."[2]
I remember he had to install/remove the drive twice because he had forgotten to install the 8087 co-processor before he put the drive back in.
The dongle was a source of constant grief. In this era, the parallel port was almost always used for printing. The dongle had a pass-through. It sometimes let you print when the pass-through was used but for whatever reason, it failed enough that it was often removed to print. The license dongle remained unplugged most of the time because the computer was used to print things more than it was used to draft things. Worse, I think this was one of two license dongles that was required by software my Dad used. These dongles appeared to be designed to fail -- kind of makes sense if their license model really is "per seat/per user" -- maybe they wanted it to fail if it's traded between machines too frequently? But suffice it to say, it broke. Around this time, thankfully, I'd discovered BBSes and software cracking. I fixed the problem and we lost the dongle.
[0] I'm going to guess that it was actually "per install/per user" and forgive the remainder of the details ... I'm going from poorly Google-enhanced memory from when I was under age ten. Anecdotally, my Dad and all of the businesses that he worked with -- outside of "taking home a dongle" -- were all properly licensed despite the common wisdom at the time being "small shops are mostly pirates."
[1] Google image search 8088 clone and look for the ones with the two 5.12" floppies, beige plastic front, all metal otherwise. We had two 5.12" floppies in the right full height drive slot and one MFM full-height HDD in the left.
[2] I'm making my Dad sound like an angry hot-head -- in reality, he was never like this except for the handful of times he had to fight with this box. Had I walked into the office, my Dad probably would have been embarrassed ... my mom was simply trying to keep me out of his hair while he was stressed out.
There was a time where lights were too big to be on headlamps. Many of us of a certain vintage grew up holding what were essentially metal cages around regular household light bulbs attached to a power cable for our parents and grandparents while they worked on carburetors or whatnot.
It's funny you mention that ... I have both discovered and forgotten the novelty of a headlamp at least 5 times in the last decade.
At the time (1980s), I'm not sure there were very many good headlamp options but either way, I wasn't in control of the portable light purchasing decisions.
However, the man who's job it was didn't skimp much. He was a small plane pilot, so I recall being warned not "to look into this flashlight[0]." It looked not much different than you're typical consumer flashlight, but if you picked it up, it was much thicker plastic, used 4 C batteries and no joke, it hurt your eyes to look into.
[0] The flashlight has a switch and a button on it, the button lets you flicker the light for emergency visual signalling (the kind that a pilot might need for the very specific situation of "need to flash morse-code through the windscreen at the ATC tower to get landing clearance because I was struck by lightning and my radios are all fried" -- so ... bright.
I worked in AutoCAD Support during these days. We hated the dongles ("hardware locks") as much as our customers. We eventually got rid of them. I haven't used any Autodesk product in decades so I don't know what they do nowadays.
Fun joke aside, I don't think that's really possible anymore since there are high quality opensource alternatives such as KVM (for server deployments) and Virtual Box (for end users).
But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.
The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case).
> But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives
I’m an EE who only needs to use 2D CAD occasionally. Back in the early days I got myself a copy of AutoCAD LT (my company used AutoCAD so it made sense to learn the same tools that out draftsmen used). I developed strong muscle memory for the AutoCAD commands, and it’s not really worth my time and hassle to learn a new tool given how infrequently I need it. Some years back I stumbled on DraftSight which was free / low-cost and was a UI clone of AutoCAD. They eventually switched to a subscription model. I’m not a big fan of SASS, but when it’s not an exorbitant price, needed for my professional work, and the software generates industry standard files that I can use with other packages if I want to get off the SASS merry-go-round, I’m not strongly opposed, either.
SolidWorks (and Catia upmarket), Siemens NX are the two most popular in the field that Inventor/Fusion plays in. 2d Autocad is pretty entrenched in some industries with no real competition.
These companies are doing well and making billions. We can assume that we will see more similar ones, as long as users still use their products in similar situations.
no, it is more like this. Imagine building a great city. Each group decides what they would like to make, and their skills. One group decides to make a "book press" , where all the parts of making a paper book are improved. A different group decides to make a lock and key system, so that any time a city person wants to read a book, any book, they must use a key for that lock system. The City government over time is included, to say that "yes, we need these locks for safety"
Years pass.. the thousands of amazing and efficient books are printed, but people now have more books than they know how to use. But the lock system is in more places. The book maker group now has bills to pay, and the interest in new books is less and less. But the lock people are making more money every month.
SO the fine book people decide that they must now build locks.
I saw this described as the conflict between business and industry.
Industry is making things. Books, food, video games, computers, petrochemicals.
Business is getting money.
Business strangles industry to death all the time.
The only thing we can do about it is make things that can't possibly be monetized. This is relatively easy in software - but still hard. Linux succeeded, and nobody pays for Solaris. Git succeeded, and nobody pays for Bitkeeper. One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents, but the world will be better off.
But the people who make these things won't be rewarded, because they won't be doing business. Indeed, in many cases they'll go straight to prison.
> One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents
The biggest trouble (after making a CAD software itself) is to keep it in line with a current regulations. I'm not familiar if A. even does that, but some regional alternatives are making money not only on the SW itself, but by providing services related to be in the compliance of regulations.
Do you mean that CAD software itself has to comply with certain regulations? Or that it helps engineers comply with regulations regarding their designs?
Not a professional CAD user myself, but as a hobbyist with an interest in this space I've never heard of the former case, so I'm curious.
> it helps engineers comply with regulations regarding their designs
This one, I should had frame it better.
> I've never heard of the former case
I don't think the CAD software itself is a point of a regulations, but there are definitely some standards and regs regarding how it should be done. A quick search yielded [0] which is a nice example of how it could be done by a hand, yet it would help immensely if the CAD software would aid and do the things by itself, saving both the time and man-hours.
I do wonder who is liable if the software used to design a bridge outputs incorrect simulation results and the bridge collapses as a consequence. I suppose it's on the senior project engineer (or whoever ultimately signs off on the design) to verify the results somehow.
Edit: This article [0] talks about the "trust" placed in commercial and open-source CAD software by engineers and doesn't mention regulation/certification of the software itself, which seems to imply that there is none.
Fusion 360 was the greatest bait and switch I’ve seen in a long time. Went from free for personal use to $300/mo to make it useful at all… right after everyone built their library of parts on the free version
For those wondering, this page shows the current difference in features between the free "Fusion 360 for personal use" and the subscription-price Fusion 360.
Sorry if I am missing something obvious, but the 10 editable files hasn't bothered me (very) much yet. Am I not using it as much? I'm I too inexperienced to notice other features that were previously there?
Certain types of screw convolving are essential to a number of my parts.
That feature is mostly now missing from the free version, though my existing files with it can change the parameters (though not add additional).
The 10 editable thing is just weird. It’s like having n light switches in your house and only 10 can be on at any given time (mechanically interlocked), but in exchange you get free electricity. While that’s a worthwhile deal for most, it’s hard to see how that incentivizes anything. It’s just mildly annoying.
It does sound like I am not making advanced enough parts to encounter anything locked off. Thank you, I was curious. I don't know what the alternatives are, but that sort of behavior does factor in to considering a license for me.
I agree on the 10 editable limit being idiotic as an incentive. They also have a quick button to flip it on and off in the sidebar. Like in your 10 switches example if you can activate any switch from anywhere in the house.
I don't use it, but it looks like it is normally $545/year and currently (sale?) priced at $382/year. What is that missing from the useful $300/month version?
Corporations are suddenly broke, so they are stealing money. If an individual did this they'd be locked up in jail. I say lock up the executives in jail.
I'm with you in the spirit of hurting Autodesk, but the FOSS alternatives, while able to produce a similar product, simply use different metaphors and concepts then F360/Inventor/etc do.
It's not like the switch from WinRAR to 7-Zip, it's a long ordeal of the (possibly already overloaded) designer learning how to do everything over again. There is very little carry-over aside from general design knowledge; and it may take a very long time for that person to become productive in whatever they choose - which by that time their just-learned software package may be the new software package to hate.
All I mean to express is that it takes a lot more than a money investment. F360 only remains dominant because -- pardon the expression -- they have a lot of us by the balls in some way.
I'd love to break free, but those that pay for my design work will be hard-pressed to understand the sudden drop in productivity, the worse deliverables/renderings/the lessened compatibility with file types/the list goes on.
It feels like the competitors need to cover some ground before a reasonable expectation can be made for the people that have to pay the bills with it to move over.
I would also like to add that part of the value of Fusion 360 and similar packages is that they use either the Parasolid Kernel (developed by Siemens), or the ACIS Kernel (developed by Dassault Systemes), or a variant (I think AutoCAD has their own ACIS fork from long ago). If you use either of those kernels, you can handle incredibly complex geometry (or even just things that seem simple but aren't, like Fillets) with ease and good compatibility with other programs. Both of those kernels started development in the late 1980s. Parasolid alone claims over 350 3D Programs license their system.
FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE, because it's the only free option. You will notice that almost no other 3D Program, paid or free, uses it. OpenCASCADE is, compared to Parasolid or ACIS; buggy, broken, incomplete, unergonomic, and obsolete. There is almost no commercial software that uses it - they all find it better to license Parasolid or ACIS despite the heavy royalties those packages require.
This puts FreeCAD in kind of a chicken-or-egg situation. The geometry kernel they use is considered unanimously inferior to the licensed kernels for almost every task, to the point that even people building new CAD programs (like the recent Plasticity beta) don't even consider it as an option. The 3D packages that license the kernels think that rebuilding ~35 years of work with extremely complex math equations requiring dozens, or even hundreds, of PhD-level math professors is too much work to justify not paying a license fee. To them, it's like saying we should rebuild Windows, but it's PhD-level math instead of APIs.
Good summary — Parasolid is indeed the key here. I think it’s a similar story in the chip design space — there are not many good open source tools at scale, most people turn to Cadence and Synopsys who have been developing crazily complex (and buggy!) EDA tools since the 1980s.
It sounds like the best approach is to invest in a FOSS alternative that uses the metaphors you are used to.
I'm sure it's unrealistic for a small design house to do it on their own, but that doesn't mean the industry couldn't band together.
I wonder what would happen if everyone donated 10% of their Autodesk licensing fees to a foundation, or if a big shop decided to hire a dozen autodesk veterans for a few years.
Sadly FOSS tends to suffer from an effect that isn't quite a tragedy of the commons but feels related. If everyone who stood to benefit from a good FOSS solution in a given problem space did invest a fraction of what they currently give to extremely profitable commercial entities for the proprietary equivalent then almost everyone (not the over-greedy corporations) could be better off. But many of these dominant software products are defended by powerful lock-in and networking effects that create very high barriers to entry for would-be competitors.
In cases where there can be "good enough" solutions that can be achieved with more modest resources and then grow after gaining some traction we have seen some success stories. But for a lot of professional software in specialised markets it's almost an all-or-nothing proposition and that defeats the incremental adoption that has been somewhat successful elsewhere. Even well-capitalised commercial competitors have failed to make dents in the market share of the established giants in some of these industries and the odds are stacked even more heavily against any FOSS effort building up from the grassroots.
I try to use freeCAD whenever possible. I'm not a professional level, and assemblies are a bit scary, but its overall a nice tool.
Just the other day I cloned one of these[1] in freecad using the image importing and scaling, quickly made a trace, added a pad and some chamfers, and had it on the 3d printer in about 25 minutes.
I'd love if FreeCAD got a benefactor like you mention.
The beauty of 3D printing, and the community is that you could have saved yourself some time and downloaded one of the many, many versions of this available online already.
I want to love FreeCAD, but it is hard to work with for complex designs compared to other tools; topological naming has been an absolute nightmare, but I persevere, it's improving slowly. At least now I'm less likely to have to throw away hours/days of design because I got into a mess.
As a Linux user, my options are slim, so I keep learning FreeCAD, and SCAD, but I'm always a little jealous when I watch a YouTube tutorial of how to do something that takes relative ease in tool X, but is an order of magnitude more complex to do in FreeCAD.
FreeCAD getting a benefactor that can propel it ahead would be huge; donations are great, but my measly donation is barely going to cover the cost of a bug fix.
> you could have saved yourself some time and downloaded one of the many, many versions of this available online already.
I enjoy the act of technical drawing and 3d design. Downloading pre-existing models doesn't have the same "I did that" feeling. Especially after a long day at the coding mines, doing some shape manipulation is like brain yoga.
The biggest reason why I love freeCAD is how it's just there. All other cad software has long user agreements, log-ins, subscription tiers. The fact I can just install it and open and get to work somewhat makes up for the odd workflow. I learned AutoDesk Inventor when I was practically a child so I always reached for it when I could get a student license, but after that expired and the cad market started moving fast, I just went to freeCAD.
I don't want to do real work in a browser, I hate browsers. So on Linux its either freeCAD or wine+fusion360.
> I enjoy the act of technical drawing and 3d design. Downloading pre-existing models doesn't have the same "I did that" feeling. Especially after a long day at the coding mines, doing some shape manipulation is like brain yoga.
Right!
I have a cheap 3D printer. It took me over a year to decide that buying it wouldn't mean another white elephant gadget.
So I made myself a list of things I'd always be able to download and print if I never managed to learn CAD. I've barely printed any of them, because I can do my own things already.
God loves the OpenSCAD/code CAD devs I am sure, but it is not really the case that you can just "program" general objects, because real life things are not simple geometrical constructions; there's a lot of arbitrary organic design in them. A lot of compromises and tweaks and useful accommodations, that lead to some hellish maths (and if I was good at maths I'd have a maths degree, not a CS degree).
I decided I would push past the pain points of learning FreeCAD, and I have now become comfortable enough in it, and designed enough real things.
I am borderline religious about the impact the combination of FreeCAD, PrusaSlicer and a cheap 3D printer has had on my ability to reason about physical objects, and make things I have only before imagined. It's incredibly liberating: I am now someone who can make physical things.
Like you I also love that I don't have to think about costs or licences.
FreeCAD isn't perfect but it's not in the same "clearly left behind" category as GIMP. It's more like QGIS: somewhat idiosyncratic but actually quite powerful. It's made my life enormously better.
As a Linux user, onshape (web based CAD) is streets ahead of FreeCAD. Seems on par with parts of Fusion I use (of course, Fusion also includes FEA, CAM and lots of other stuff). Not libre, but free for personal use (all your free tier designs are public) and works on Linux.
I'm still preparing myself for when I need to learn onshape to do something freeCAD cant.
You basically made a list of reasons why I avoid it, its in a browser, you need a log-in, basically zero ownership of your designs on the free tier, with a jump to $1500/y for the "standard" tier. I know cad programs are difficult to make but damn they make it easy to not want to be their customer.
I've created an account but I need to do some reading, it's a different enough workflow to FreeCAD, that I couldn't immediately figure out how to do some basic things.
Have you checked the logs or tried submitting the issue? If you haven't they won't probably even know about such an issue and this won't be fixed.
To put this in context if you would be paying for this, and have such a problem, you would for sure either submit the issue or cancel/refund the license and maybe put some feedback somewhere.
Well, whenever I’ve trialed FreeCAD I was hoping to love it, so certainly not intentionally being a jerk to it, but also certainly being a complete and utter n00b to it. Never have gotten to the point of doing something I could use.
> FreeCAD is the closest, but unlike the Eagle vs Kicad comparison, it's miles behind Inventor and Solid works.
That just means we have exciting changelogs ahead of us.
In my case, I remember running into some edge cases with parametric designs, but I was overall very happy to not have supported an untrustworthy business.
And, to put my money where my mouth is, I just renewed my donation in Liberapay.
You need an massive amount of money indeed to have a free product that matches the Autodesk commercial offer in CAD tools. Like some EU grant or something. I know FreeCAD is used by corporations such as Behringer, are they even giving back to open source? I doubt it, but it's apparently good enough for them...
Exactly, I have been struggling with FreeCAD and had to go back to fusion many times. Unlike Kicad and Blender which are good alternatives in their sector that work.
freeCAD had a critical issue in topological naming (they are working on a fix as we speak and it's going to be out "soon"), and it's hideously clunky. Basically, when you resize a sketch and that causes more faces to be created it makes all your other stuff go crazy.
You can also use realthunders branch which fixes the naming issue as well.
Mangos videos teach you a bit how to think reasonably though freecads infuriating errors, too. The guy is worth a watch if you want to start using the best open source tool.
freeCAD sucks, until you learn it, and then it works alright. Learn to use data planes instead of sketch on face and the topo naming isn't even an issue anymore.
I am still a relative novice but: you don't really need to use datum planes at all to avoid TNP through sketch placement.
Each sketch can be placed independently anyway (offset from its attachment), and you can place them parametrically. So if you want the sketch on the top surface of another pad you can simply set the attachment position with e.g. <<Pad>>.Length referring to that object. Or by using a named reference from another sketch, or whatever.
Local co-ordinate systems can be useful, and sometimes I have added planes attached to those, because setting up attachment in truly arbitrary places is fiddly, but I almost never use datum planes.
TNP isn't usually triggered by resizing a sketch, unless the resizing causes some topology to change -- an edge being added in the edge list before a critical one is what will break attachment. For example if resizing one sketch in a body causes an earlier-numbered edge of a face you're attaching to, to disappear, that will do it, I think.
So generally TNP is something you don't always have to worry about, if you plan your design; sometimes you can attach to faces without concerns.
This isn't actually truly unique to FreeCAD. All CAD kernels have to solve this problem somehow; it's just that they are usually really narrow edge cases rather than big ugly obvious ones!
For me the bigger problem with FreeCAD (that won't go away quickly) is fillets and chamfers. OpenCascade can't allow a chamfer to consume other edges so you often run into difficulties where you have to tweak some measurement by a fraction of a millimetre so it doesn't.
I am getting around that by considering carefully which chamfers are merely presentational and which are effectively structural. The structural chamfers I may solve in some other way -- within the sketch, or with a subtractive operation, or whatever.
I agree with the recommendation for the Mango Jelly videos, and if you're on Facebook, the main FreeCAD group can be useful (Mr Mango Jelly hangs out there).
Datum planes are usually unnecessary; cluttering up a design with a plane per sketch is certainly the wrong way to go about it.
You can place each sketch with the same tools you place a datum plane -- by editing the attachment and attachment position. (You just can't do it at the point of creating the sketch in the same way as you can when creating a plane).
You can then use expressions in those positions, including e.g. the width/depth/length of other objects (using the length of another Pad would be one very common scenario). Or you can use values from a Spreadsheet.
And TNP won't always bite you anyway. It's possibly better to learn how to fix attachment issues than clutter up your design with datum planes.
Learning how to place sketches in arbitrary space is so core to FreeCAD that it's probably worth going through the pain on this.
Datum planes do have uses -- like when you want to attach large numbers of sketches to a single plane, or when you want to model some arbitrary plane without using physical geometry. They are also useful for e.g. cutting holes up to a face (because the plane can substitute for a face)
They are also helpful, I find, when I am using an LCS for some feature.
But quite often you see people trying to work around TNP with a datum plane, only to attach that plane to the same object that will have the TNP.
This tutorial on attachment may help you (it's a bit involved)
Because at the time SoftImage was still around, which meant that Autodesk owning 3ds max and maya didn't form a monopoly. Of course, Adobe now owns the defunct SoftImage brand anyway after Avid ran it into the ground.
Autodesk bought Softimage|XSI and then simply killed it after a few years. It's crazy that they can get rid of their competitors this easily.
Another reason why I recommend all 3D artists to learn Blender. Nobody can buy and then kill it off. I'm pretty sure Autodesk would love to do that if they could.
I love solvespace. I basically only use solvespace now.
It’s very lightweight and minimalistic, but it’s not the easiest to use and very bare bones. I often have to find new ways of building things to account for the lack of functions, such as filleting an edge. In a way it’s a good thing because it’s hard to over complicate a design with unnecessary features, which I tend to do, but my designs in solvespace aren’t as nice or pretty and everything takes longer than inventor or fusion, but it takes half a second to boot up, I love the UI, and I really don’t need a complicated CAD tool for the vast majority of my projects.
The other caveat is that like any FOSS CAD tool it’s not totally stable and certain actions may get you into a bad state and possibly crash the program, but eventually you get used to it and can work around them (so far as I’ve seen).
If you’re just doing simple hobby projects, I’d say it’s worth trying out but it does take a little time to get used to. For professional endeavors it’s probably not gonna do the job.
I recently came across CadZinho (https://github.com/zecruel/CadZinho), which is MIT-licensed, cross-platform (also works in a browser) and uses Lua as its extension language.
It's a challenge.
Look at Linux vs Windows. Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows, minus the user hostility, yet people continue with Windows because change is hard, not to mention matching everyone else. So, even if OSS CAD became a drop in replacement for Autodesk, there's gotta be something extra to truly bite at Autodesk.
This attitude is harmful. There are legitimate (or maybe illegitimate in your view, but real) reasons people have to stick with proprietary software. As long as these aren't solved, people can't switch.
While free software may not have a marketing budget, its freedom aspect is generally an inherent advantage over other software (no licensing, no user hostility). There may be proprietary alternatives to Aufacity and Gimp, but nobody knows them because the FOSS versions are so easy to get. If there are two largely equivalent pieces of software, one proprietary and the other FOSS, the FOSS one will win. It just has to be good enough.
But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be.
FreeCAD is getting better and getting quite decent for hobby stuff (I still find Fusion much more intuitive, but it's getting alright), but we can't just go "why doesn't everybody switch, they must be dumb", just because we are happy with the functionality.
This isn't specifically directed at you, but a specific FOSS-high-horse attitude I see every now and then and used to hold myself. I think it's something that keeps FOSS from gaining market share by solving real problems people have. I could tell you a bunch of stories of people trying really hard to switch and ending up in a world of pain. We can't hand-wave that away. We have to actually improve the things we want people to use.
I agree, on your point of resolving limitations which prevent switching, is there a standard, or hub for listing limitations, bugs, inconveniences according to how much friction they provide potential adopters?
But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be.
This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close.
For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation.
Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with.
And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts.
That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.
> Modern distros are a drop in replacement for Windows
I really want to agree, and I am a big advocate for using Linux exactly because of the hostility from Microsoft, but for most users it definitely is not a drop in replacement. For an average user that is used to Microsoft Office, the difference is simply too big.
It might not be the best example, but just look at how Linus from LTT struggled to get one of the "most user-friendly" distros working.
Which distributions? I switched some of my machines due to the increasing user hostility in Windows, but found it a big pain in the ass, even as a developer. And that's not even considering how many programs/games will only work on Windows.
Give Manjaro a try. Not perfect but on all hardware I installed it ran flawlessly with all hardware detected out of the box with no need to install anything, either from a CD or online. Only single exception being a big network printer (Canon, IIRC) which in the end only required to go to openprinting.org, download the relevand ppd (just a few kbytes) and give it to Cups when configuring the new printer, which was already correctly detected btw.
As a Debian user (which I love but would not recommend to newbies) I've tried Ubuntu in the past but didn't like it at all; Manjaro in my opinion is the best one for moving away from Windows in the most painless way.
I am a big fan of Manjaro as a distro, but I would not recommend it to someone coming from Windows simply because things move fast and break - I've personally had proprietary software that worked at first, but later broke because libc had moved on. My solution (after trying plenty of workarounds) was to run it in an Ubuntu docker, but that upgrade cost me a lot of time and I don't expect somebody coming from Windows to put up with that much pain.
I also don't want to recommend Ubuntu (if I had to pick a single reason it would be snap), but from a problem-googleability-index point of view, it's hard to beat. Perhaps Mint, because it's mostly Ubuntu, but without snap (last I checked).
A lot if this will boil down to what you found to be a pain. I hate to "give you more work," but do you have a list of things that you found particularly difficult?
It's death by a thousand paper cuts. No problems are a real blocker for somebody who is good with tech, but it's still more effort that I'd like to spend. I'm willing to endure that because Microsoft has become too user hostile since Win10. But I don't see how a non technical person is supposed to deal with it.
I've had plenty of problems with Mint on my work laptop. For example:
* Regularly swapped itself into a screen freeze. Possibly because it defaulted the swap partition to 1 GB.
* Default boot partition was too small, so it ran out of space for new kernels. I have to manually remove kernels because the auto-remove is too slow to stay below the limit.
* Hibernate doesn't work out of the box. I managed to figure out that I have to install some other cryptically named package, otherwise `sudo pm-hibernate` fails without printing an error message. Then a distribution upgrade removed the required package from the repos. And that's just making the command line tool work, it doesn't add it to the power manager so it triggers automatically after an idle period or when closing the laptop lid.
I encountered similar issues on my gaming desktop running mint (e.g. the nvidia driver wouldn't load for no discernible reason) and steam deck.
Odd that you have partition woes, to me. That said, I have defaulted, for a long time, to not have fancy partition schemes. Where fancy is embarrassingly vague, of course; but the general idea is that extra partitions are largely solving problems from decades past. Worse, it leads to the swap and kernel space problems rather quickly. Though, swap into freezes is new to me.
Hibernate is one that I have heard a ton of troubles with. Largely with laptops. Good luck getting past it.
I am surprised you have had issues with the steam deck. That thing has been rock solid for me. Almost certainly my luck on the games I prefer.
Edit: I do want to underline my point about luck on my part. And good luck to you! I don't claim to have a panacea here. I also don't think it is some failing of anyone that some folks would stick with Windows or other.
I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person.
Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing.
Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora.
Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update.
I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft.
Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat.
Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware.
Is the Fedora Project also going to follow Red Hat in the same bad direction? I thought for the most part that it is community maintained and the upstream version of RHEL.
You are correct that Fedora is mainly community driven and currently receives a large part of its funding from Red Hat. I could have phrased my initial post better, I am currently not concerned that their actions could negatively affect the long term success of Fedora (as I highly doubt they'd take contributors away from their own upstream), it was more about giving credit where it's due to an organization that I view critically overall.
Most GPUs have their drivers already built in - unlike on Windows. If you need proprietary Nvidia drivers, on most distros you just need to open the software center, search "nvidia" and click install.
Honestly in this regard, Windows struggles to be a drop in replacement for Linux, not the other way around.
That wasn't enough - I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly.
I make software that runs on Linux exclusively for a living. I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows.
And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.
> I had to shut down the X server to install the driver properly.
And you would have to reboot on Windows. Rebooting would also restart your display server on Linux, so that is at worst equally as painful as Windows.
> I know very well how Linux works. It is still necessary to run stuff from the terminal from time to time. Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows.
I think you probably choose the command line way to do things because you "know very well how Linux works". The whole GPU driver installation process can be done without knowing what a terminal emulator is. If you choose to take advantage of your existing knowledge, that isn't a flaw of the system.
> Even on user-friendly distros like Steam OS - some games will require some tinkering - but they run flawlessly on Windows.
I have not opened a terminal on my Steam Deck with the intention of making a game work. The most I have ever had to do was copy launch options from steam reviews or ProtonDB. Sure, that's not perfect. And that still leaves a few games unplayable. At this point about 80~90% of games can simply run though, which is way more games than anyone has time to play, and is a sizeable catalog when compared to other gaming systems. It may not be a "drop in replacement" in the sense that it can play 100% of games, but functionally it is a drop in replacement.
> And another thing. I could not get Thunderbolt working on Linux at all. It worked just fine on Windows on that same laptop.
I'm a noob when it comes to thunderbolt vs usb-c vs whatever else looks identical. I dock my work laptop (which runs Fedora) with some usb-c-like dock though and I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. I don't have anything to add other than that anecdote.
I had to shut down the X server and then run the driver installer from command line. And then start the X server again. That definitely isn't necessary on Windows.
Also, it doesn't really matter if 80-90% of games work if the one that you really want to play - doesn't. And some very popular games still don't work on Linux.
Yes - the USB-C standard is a mess. A USB-C port that supports Thunderbolt looks identical to any other USB-C port. In my case, I was trying to use a PCI-E enclosure, and it just refused to work on Linux - no matter what I tried.
Even though I actually agree with your main points, I regularly upgrade my Nvidia drivers on windows and it definitely does not need a reboot to do so.
They did say "install" rather than "upgrade". I have an Nvidia GPU in my work laptop running Fedora, and I often upgrade my system without rebooting or restarting Sway. Now I'm not sure that I actually am using the new drivers until I reboot, but that doesn't matter to me, and I suspect it doesn't matter to most people.
I have been hearing this for 25 years now (no exaggeration). Not sure if distros are really as good now, because I gave up trying long time ago, but I suspect they still suck if you are not a very tech affine user. And I blame the Linux community for promising much more than they were able to deliver.
I don't have hard numbers to prove, but I bet that Blender is currently wiping the floor with Autodesk Maya and 3dsmax in wide areas of the gamedev world, at least for new studios that have the luxury to start their asset production workflows from scratch (the others can't do much else than begrudgingly accept that Autodesk tightens the screws more and more until they can also break out of their self-induced vendor lock-in).
Which is a shame because Maya is actually a very decent product, or at least was until Autodesk bought it. I only actively followed Maya development until around 2018 when I maintained a plugin for it, and back then it was already pretty clear that Autodesk favours milking their existing customer base over investing into their product development.
The writing is on the wall for Altium, partially because they are shooting themselves in the foot with their pricing and feature releases (people and companies are tired of paying $3k/year for new via stitching tools when memory leak crashes still occur daily) and partially because Kicad has improved to the point where it is a viable alternative for small and medium projects.
IE lost to Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. Windows Media Player lost to VLC and MPC-HC. BandiCam and FRAPS lost to OBS. The GIF format lost to PNG (for non-animated images).
Put another way, I'm not sure what you would be paying for instead of using Audacity (for a full blown DAW, I'd still go with Reaper). I haven't used MuseScore in a long time (it was good enough for me back then), but it had also been improving a lot lately. And I don't know of anyone who still uses WinZip (though I still see WinRar on less savvy users).
I believe you can run a cracked version legally in the US provided it gives you the same functionality as what you had licensed, you aren't so much "circumventing a technological measure" but instead making it work correctly per the terms of your license.
Regardless, if you have a legitimate license, and they pull this shit, you have the moral right to ensure that you can still use the license you hold. So, crack the shit out of it.
Moral rights mean fuck all in court, especially if you don’t have the money to throw at lawyers.
Also the DRM on all of these professional apps extends to the files they produce if you open a file in vector works autocad or any other professional software that was created or edited on an illicit copy a warning would pop up saying that the file was created on an illegal version and many of them wouldn’t allow you to edit the file further and for those which do saving the file again on a copy with a legitimate license does not get rid of the message that file is tainted for good.
This pretty much prevents any real world use of illicit copies professionally.
Yes, it is. Thanks to Hollywood it's illegal to circumvent a technological protection measure even if the technological protection measure is preventing you from getting what you paid for.
Not necessasily. Some exemptions exist in the DMCA, and the Librarian of Congress has the power to grant further exemptions. LoC exemptions expire after three years unless the LoC renews them.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
Not that I disagree with you entirely, but please, Russia is killing and disfiguring men, women and children with rocket artillery, kidnapping kids, tearing families and human lives to pieces. The impact on Ukraine, now AND in the long run, is an will be enormous and absolutely incomparable to corporations screwing people up with subscriptions.
And it’s unbelievably tone deaf and ridiculously offensive to those who actually suffer. A reminder that a total loss of human perspective is woefully easy.
Another way...what about the corporate military industrial complex, which wages disinformation campaigns (2003 Iraq, anyone?) to _go to war_ to generate them profits via manufacturing weapons? What about all the families that are torn apart from those weapons? The soldiers who lose lives, lose limbs, lose a peaceful mind?
It all leads back to corporations that rule America, and now to a larger extent the rest of the world via the globalist trade agreements they lobby for.
but is comparable to the totality of what corporations to do people. Like I said, frog in a pot. Every step is small, but the sum of all the steps is big.
> Corporations are doing that to us, but way more subtly, but with no less of an impact in the long run
Corporations generally don't send a missile into a pizza shop to kill two 15 year old twins, or send conscripts into battle and shoot at them if they retreat.
Yes, and so does XE/PMC WAGNER. That's why I said "generally". If your example to claim corporations are evil is 400 years old from a mercantilist era, then... Ok, I guess?
This reminds me of a café in Lausanne that started operations by selling lifetime, three-coffees-per-month subscriptions, and then after a year or so "management changed" and they annulled all subscriptions:D
I mean often “management changed” often means the company went out of business and someone bought it and is giving it a go themselves. This is a bit deceptive, but it’s really a new company often.
I’ve always pirated AutoCAD and will continue to do so. I use it occasionally and just for hobby stuff, nothing commercial. So why would I pay out the ass for that? Same story with Photoshop. Ohhhh it might contain malware… I don’t really give a damn because to me it’s the only option, paying $10, $20, $50/month for software I hardly use but still kind of need is not an option.
Run pirated software in a containerized/VM instance of Windows (or even macOS) and you’ll be alright.
You could also diff the binaries with the unmodified version. We did that at work once (on behalf of the publisher of the same software) and the cracked version was literally one byte different. Just to be sure, we also reverse-engineered that part of the code to see what the original vs. cracked logic did. No surprises, no malware, just skipping over the license check.
I think it’s part of their plan to allow pirated versions of their software be distributed precisely because now you are semi proficient in the software, further solidifying their relevance.
When you run the software in a VM of Windows, how do you provide access to the files that you want to edit? Do you have a shared volume between the host and the VM?
Yes, I just share the ./Downloads folder usually, sometimes the whole home folder, but if malware is truly a concern it’s safest to share a dedicated “Windows VM” folder for just those files.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that YouTube videos linked on HN significantly detract from my experience.
Particularly when the video communicates something that can be easily and succinctly communicated in writing. In such cases, I feel that a linked YouTube video is promotional (of the YouTuber) rather than informative.
And I say that as someone for whom YouTube pays the bills.
Subscriptions are a scam. I am actively consolidating my payments and shifting to next best alternatives that give me one time pay options or open source and contributing there.
I feel same about salaries. Paying monthly salary is a scam. Can I buy your time for life for a 1 time payment?
But seriously, calling subscription a "scam" is very delusional. It seems like you have not released a product/saas. I support your effort in supporting and contributing to opensource though.
You can buy my work for this month and pay me once. If you would like my newer, additional work, you’ll have to pay me again. Incidentally, because I’m nice I’ll let you keep the work I already did for you without charging you again for it.
I think in this case it depends on perspective to describe whether or not something is a scam.
It's absurdly unfair that I get to buy a door, a handgun, wire shelving, plumbing fixtures, etc, etc, for a 1 time payment.
It's wild to see all this churn in the markets as players bloom, ship product, and die within the year. It's so sad that they're evergreen (never before having released a product) and are leaving money on the table, dooming themselves to failure.
When will they learn that recurring revenue is the only way they'll stay in business? I'd like _someone_ to stick around long enough to honor my three, five, and ten-year warranties!
it says a lot about the state of society when I actually cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I think it's sarcasm, I'm almost convinced it is, but at the same time it's an argument that I'd expect Big Tech companies to make.
Sure, pay me $10m upfront and I'm all yours for the 40 years I expect to work. I invest some of that and it turns into $20-$30m or more. Huge win tonget upfront payment if you're fine speculating a bit with the money.
>But seriously, calling subscription a "scam" is very delusional.
I think converting a one payment package to a reoccurring payment is a scam.
What is the best (affordable!) CAD software for a hobbyist with no experience? I was recently looking into this and the leading software was like 6,000 USD a year per seat.
I love Rhino (https://www.rhino3d.com/); it's a pleasure to use. It's not parametric like SolidWorks, but you own it for $1K, there's a very helpful community, the company (McNeel) is great, they regularly improve the features (recently added SubD), and it's much easier to learn than SW.
It depends what you want to do. If you want to make stuff for 3D printing, it will be great. If you want to machine things on a CNC mill, you will also need CAM software which can be expensive. madCAM ($1K to own it) works well, but it is unclear whether that has been abandoned.
Parametric? Alibre. It only runs on Windows, but you can buy a lifetime license, and you get a SolidWorks-lite set of functionality. Much more usable than FreeCAD. It also comes with basic CAM software that is sufficient enough for a wood router.
edit: also, Solvespace was mentioned upthread. It's pretty basic, but very nice and easy to use, and has good skill transfer to more featureful CAD programs.
Second for this -- I worked on a product that used their back-end API several years ago (just before they were acquired). Great group of developers over there.
What is your back end? Do you want to create 3D art for games? I think Rhino owns that space. Want to 3D print with parametric dimensions? A lot of CAD packages can give you a file that you can feed to your favorite slicer. Have a CNC milling machine? Look for a post processor that works for your machine and work backwards to select the CAD package.
Of note: they have made their user forum completely useless and it looks like they will soon adopt a cloud-based, subscription model about which their users are quite unhappy.
I honestly hope their cloud based push causes their downfall. It's different enough that I think it will open the door for millions of users to look around for other options for their CAD software. It's going to be a perfect opportunity for a cheaper (open source??) software to step in and eat their lunch.
They have a "maker license" that's less un-affordable (iirc about $100 or $150 a year?), and they provide access either for free or even more discounted than the maker license for students & the like.
Though based on other comments it sounds like that may not be the case for long so ymmv
They are loathsome people to work with who only care about licensing and then just abandon you to buggy tools. Still I look at the open source and other competitors and they win, at all things.
I am hoping they are declared a monopolist by the EU but I think the Building Information Management software tide will drown them. It's complicated though.
Blender is absolutely amazing, but for the sequencer I had to switch to Resolve because it's just too slow. 1.5 hour long video takes 12 hours to render in blender and about 40 minutes in resolve, with just a simple chroma key processing.
Rent-seeking enshitification. "FU poor customer, pay us thousands it will be permanent. (One month later.) FU poor customer today, now you must pay hundreds every month. It will be awesome!"
EA and their Play and Play Pro subscription bullshit too.
I wonder how many of you HN devs are involved in developing phone-home tech. I imagine Autodesk has all sorts of devious ways built in to their products to phone home and ensure active paid-for licenses.
To be fair, it's a lose-lose here. If we didn't implement strict and PITA-to-circumvent licensing, we would for sure have customers abusing it. As a small company, we cannot afford to patrol our customers constantly to make sure they are actually paying for software. We at least try our best to keep it out of their way. It's not my favorite thing to spend my dev time on, but I do understand it.
I'm on about year 7 of my supposedly 4 year Education License, so I get all of their product suite for free (or most of it...all the good stuff at least.)
I'm over 15 years out of University, and I never took any course that required an Autodesk product while I was there.
It's not wise to use cracked software for business. Someone might talk, and your office could get raided by the cops. Yes - that happens in places like Eastern Europe too - some people that I know found this out the hard way.
The more likely scenario, at least in the US, is that if your business is already using some legit licensed software from the same publisher, the publisher invokes a contractual right to audit licenses at your business. They find a bunch of unlicensed copies, and send you a huge bill. No police, just a civil matter, but potentially very expensive for the business.
When I still did systems engineering work (2001-2011), I personally saw Microsoft conduct a license audit. No one in the organization was using pirated software, but we still got a big bill because the reseller we bought licenses from misrepresented what some of those licenses covered. In that case, MS was willing to chalk it up to an honest mistake as long as we uninstalled the software from the systems that the licenses didn't cover. I doubt they'd have been willing to do that if we'd been running actual cracked versions of their products.
The BSA runs a "snitch" program that disgruntled employees and competitors can use to report pirated software. This is how many businesses get raided. The person that I know also suspects that his company got raided because someone reported them.
The BSA has been active here for more than 2 decades now. And they cooperate with local law enforcement. Pirated software can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars - so the cops simply can't ignore financial crimes this big.
I've also heard that they ignore stuff like music and movies on those PCs, because it's too much work to prove whether they are legal or not, and they cost peanuts compared to stuff like AutoCAD licences.
But with software - you only have to ask the accounting department for receipts.
It falls under the Australian Consumer Protection under misleading or deceptive conduct.[0] A lifetime licence marketed as such cannot be withdrawn let alone with EULA/TOS presented after the purchase.[1] Probably could also get your money back from the retailer/autodesk too if you cannot use the software with your lifetime licence.
[0] https://consumer.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553FT_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_cases