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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.

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