Skip to main content

students.autodesk.com : watch out if you manage a classroom

As reported earlier, the Autodesk Education Community provides free licenses for students. However, if you are a school which uses Autodesk software for teaching, you have to buy a classroom license, which is not free, but, considering the amount of software you got, is priced fairly low (about €1.000 for 10 licenses for a suite with most Autodesk software included).

So far, nothing special, you would think. Unless you start to mix things. The EULA for the student version only allows (apart from the obvious non-commercial) this for work at home only and not for the classroom sessions. It is primarily meant to ensure classrooms will buy a lab-license on their computers.

We had a rather heavy discussion in a meeting with CAD teachers yesterday, where this seemed really problematic. Everybody assumed that they had bought a sufficient amount of licenses, while the educational responsible for Autodesk seemed to suggest we needed to buy additional licenses. Why am I not surprised?

Let me explain this with an example. We have currently 50 Autodesk licenses for our classrooms, which allows us to install the software we want (e.g. AutoCAD Architecture, Revit, Ecotect and 3ds Max Design) on all our PC's. But there is a problem when students bring their laptop to the classroom. For any student following classes, the school should have a corresponding license.

Another teacher at another school has no lab computers available, as all students have a school laptop. They assumed (with the agreement of the dealer) that all students could use the student-version from the Autodesk Education Community without problem. But the license implies that you have to buy additional licenses for any student following classes. So that teacher has no computers, yet still he has to buy a lab-license for all his students, which the students won't even install, as they have the student version with their own registration already loaded on their laptop. The problem is that the student license is invalid the moment a student enters a classroom.

What to do if you manage a classroom? What do you do?

Do you need to buy a license for all concurrent students following classes? Or for the total amount of students? And what about the students using this in the design studio, who don't have CAD classes?

The answer from Autodesk: describe your situation and they will provide a specific proposal for your classroom. I actually hoped that Autodesk would have informed their own dealers from where we bought our software on beforehand.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...

PythonOCC : Open Source interactive CAD shell (and how to run it on OSX)

What is PythonOCC? PythonOCC is an Open Source (LGPL) Python-wrapper for OpenCASCADE. So what is OpenCASCADE (OCC)? This is an advanced Open Source (custom license) modeling kernel, comparable to commercial engines, such as ACIS or Parasolid, which are used in quite some commercial CAD programs. When you want to develop CAD software, you could use OCC and write programs in C++. And why using Python? With this wrapper, you can create CAD and geometry scripts in Python, which is an interpreted Object-oriented scripting language. You can write almost "on-the-fly" and seriously reduce the implementation effort, by skipping the compiling-phase. You can even interact with a running program in the Python interpreter. Want to read more about this? The OpenCASCADE official website  (currently Linux and Windows are officially supported) The PythonOCC website/blog  (beware that the core of the actions happen in the development repositories). So far so good. Now the nasty, techn...

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 8 - Strategies to tackle IFC)

This is part 8 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss IFC as a transfer format towards Unity. As with the previous post, this is not a coding post, although hints and examples are provided. Open BIM and IFC Everybody who ever met me or heard me present on a conference or BIM-lecture will not be surprised to hear that I’m a strong believer in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open standard, with already two versions published as an ISO standard, being IFC2x2 and IFC4 (but surprisingly not IFC2x3 which is widely used). In the ideal world, this would be the format to use to transfer BIM data into another environment, such as Unity. So what are our options? Looking in the Unity Asset Store Assimp is a library which supports multiple formats, including IFC. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/trilib-unity-model-loader-package-91777   I did a few attempts, but alas without any success. It is po...