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Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

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Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#181
post #152

Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.

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 h…

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#182
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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#183
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Look into onshape - all online (read, no installs of any kind required), free for personal use, and really what fusion 360 should have been. Still missing minor advanced features of fusion360 but imo worlds better even if so

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://www.amazon.com/TILISMA-Bo…

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/da…

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#185
post #105

Just a reminder that Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world, and this is just the way they always operated.

> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world 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 ho…

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#186

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.

Raises hand

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#187
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 G…

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#188
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autodesk is the oracle/adobe of the CAD world 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 ho…

I have this picture in my head of you holding a worklight above an open CPU case while your dad works to connect the drive.

Why not use a decent headlamp? So much more comfortable.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#189
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My recommendation would be Fedora Silverblue[0]. 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…

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.

Re: Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

#190
post #6

Time to invest the comparable amount of money in FOSS alternatives? FreeCAD, LibreCAD, BRL-CAD, and so on.

FreeCAD is the closest, but unlike the Eagle vs Kicad comparison, it's miles behind Inventor and Solid works. I just bought a lifetime license for Alibre CAD, it's for profit closed source but much more usable. FreeCAD needs a benefactor like CERN for KiCAD to bring it up to speed.

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.
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