Due to our fear of the recession we took on a lot more work than we can do and have had to get two new cad monkeys in pronto! We are a small office and really need some more autocad licenses; but they are really expensive (as i'm sure you know), for the size of office we have for such short term work.
We only really need autocad 2005, anything newer would be a plus, but we were wondering:
can we buy old autocad licenses?
surely, with so many companies going bust, selling software which is really expensive in the first place would be a good idea. You can sell drawing boards, computer games and CD's.
I guess the main fear is that you could just send one disk around the office, we don't want to cheat the system, but want to recycle old software!
Yup. You sure can, although this was recently the subject of litigation between a seller and AutoDesk Corp. The seller won.
I don't know how you'd go about it if you want to be legit - technically a license that has been upgraded can't be resold, though I don't know of any way to verify that.
I've heard of AutoCAD license leasing - have you looked into that?
oddly enough, i've been working with autodesk on this sort of thing. here's the line as i understand it: the lawsuit above is still in litigation (it's on appeal), so they won't recognize a re-sold license as 'legal' and, hence, won't allow you to register it with them, provide support, or enroll it in their subscription service. they are still aggressively trying to shut down ads for copies for resale.
however, for exactly what you're talking about, i've been encouraging them to match an offer archicad already has, which is that you can lease a copy of archicad in 'blocks' of time, for about $450 for 300 hours of use time (something like that). you could then re-up a couple of more times, with all the money you put towards the lease counting towards buying the full license. i know autodesk said they had something like this for a while - i haven't been told what their official line is now (if the program is in place or not). what i love about this program is that it's something you can almost build into the project cost and there's no commitment to finance something. why more of these guys are doing this, especially right now, is mind blowing to me.
worst case, you could download their free copies available to out of work people. personally, hard for me to defend.
finally, have you looked into LT? it seems like a much cheaper way to have you get what you need for far less than the full blown autocad. depending on what you're needing the employees to do, it may be an option.
drop me an email offline - i can hook you up with a few people to call about the more legal options.
Autodesk is such a bunch of bullies I wouldn't change the way I do business just to stay in their good graces for the benefit of technical support Here's the write up on the suit. It's pretty damning:
Autocad Licenses query?
Hello Archinecters!
Due to our fear of the recession we took on a lot more work than we can do and have had to get two new cad monkeys in pronto! We are a small office and really need some more autocad licenses; but they are really expensive (as i'm sure you know), for the size of office we have for such short term work.
We only really need autocad 2005, anything newer would be a plus, but we were wondering:
can we buy old autocad licenses?
surely, with so many companies going bust, selling software which is really expensive in the first place would be a good idea. You can sell drawing boards, computer games and CD's.
I guess the main fear is that you could just send one disk around the office, we don't want to cheat the system, but want to recycle old software!
Please advise us!
Yup. You sure can, although this was recently the subject of litigation between a seller and AutoDesk Corp. The seller won.
I don't know how you'd go about it if you want to be legit - technically a license that has been upgraded can't be resold, though I don't know of any way to verify that.
I've heard of AutoCAD license leasing - have you looked into that?
stuart,
oddly enough, i've been working with autodesk on this sort of thing. here's the line as i understand it: the lawsuit above is still in litigation (it's on appeal), so they won't recognize a re-sold license as 'legal' and, hence, won't allow you to register it with them, provide support, or enroll it in their subscription service. they are still aggressively trying to shut down ads for copies for resale.
however, for exactly what you're talking about, i've been encouraging them to match an offer archicad already has, which is that you can lease a copy of archicad in 'blocks' of time, for about $450 for 300 hours of use time (something like that). you could then re-up a couple of more times, with all the money you put towards the lease counting towards buying the full license. i know autodesk said they had something like this for a while - i haven't been told what their official line is now (if the program is in place or not). what i love about this program is that it's something you can almost build into the project cost and there's no commitment to finance something. why more of these guys are doing this, especially right now, is mind blowing to me.
worst case, you could download their free copies available to out of work people. personally, hard for me to defend.
finally, have you looked into LT? it seems like a much cheaper way to have you get what you need for far less than the full blown autocad. depending on what you're needing the employees to do, it may be an option.
drop me an email offline - i can hook you up with a few people to call about the more legal options.
Autodesk is such a bunch of bullies I wouldn't change the way I do business just to stay in their good graces for the benefit of technical support Here's the write up on the suit. It's pretty damning:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars
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