AutoCAD Perpetual Licenses Can No Longer Be Activated
Steve Johnson (in 2016):
Hidden in amongst a bunch of the usual highly dubious subscription statements from Carl Bass is an announcement that spells doom for Autodesk perpetual license owners.
[…]
Translation: Autodesk is going to drive up prices of maintenance subscription (perpetual license keeping-up-to-date fee) to match the much higher prices of product subscription (rental). Maintenance subscription will then be merged into oblivion. Your return on your long-term investment in Autodesk software will be zero.
What if you don’t want maintenance updates—can you keep using what you have?
my permanent standalone autocad product license has become invalid. and as of a couple of months ago, is no longer supported. so I can’t get a new standalone permanent license. they will however sign me up for current software on a subscription basis.
Via Louis Rossmann (Hacker News):
If you have older versions, their activation system doesn’t appear to work the way that it used to, you have to do manual activation. And what gets particularly more annoying is some people need activation codes, some people don’t, but more importantly, if you move on to a new computer, this appears to be the case that I’ve confirmed with several people who are actually using this software. You can use it as long as you like, but if you move to a new computer, you have to move the license as well, using the license transfer utility. If you no longer have access to the old license installation, you’re out of luck. Autodesk won’t supply you a new activation code.
In other words, even if you only want to restore from a backup and run an old version of the app on old hardware with an old OS, that may no longer be possible.
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Subscription is a deal breaker!
Everything getting worse everywhere all at once.