Everyone in all the different industries that use CAD should fund an open source alternative.
I'm sure something like that must already exist but apparently it isn't built out enough.
FreeCAD is the current contender.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GEDA
For electronics at least, it's okay.
KiCAD 7 presents a pretty solid offer now: https://www.kicad.org/
Autodesk and Solidworks are both doing it.
You can keep the perpetual license for the older stuff, but there are no more upgrades like before. You pay SaaS.
>You can keep the perpetual license for the older stuff
No, you can't. That is the point. The perpetual licenses are being disabled on the activation servers so that people can't even reinstall old versions on old computers that are already paid for. That is what is making this case especially controversial. People are ASSUMING, like you, that they can keep using the versions they already have, until they can't, and Autodesk tells them they have to pay a subscription license now to 'use' the perpetual license they already paid for.
I don't give a fuck what he thinks, I have two perpetual purchased for lots of money 2019 licenses that do not expire. They can never be for anything else other than 2019. Autodesk whines to us about these licenses all the time, but they are non-expiring for the product they were purchased for. Autodesk continually tries to get us to update, but the company prefers 2019 for now and we're good. As far as I know, this was the last version you could do this with. The minute we let our gaurd down, Autodesk will automatically convert them to SaaS licenses with no recourse for us.
Network license seats are a different story. Those also used to be perpetual, but now they are not.
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