his client was in the same situation as you. After a hardware failure they tried to reinstall 2019 and it would not let them install / activate / recover from backup because they detected a hardware change and forced them to get a new license key.
you are just one hard drive, ram module, motherboard, etc failure away from being locked out of your 'perpetual' 2019 keys.
The minute you have bad luck and a piece of hardware doesn't last forever. or someone lets their guard down and doesn't jump through all the right hoops and clicks the wrong button somewhere your keys are locked out, gone, and irreplicable.
totally scummy, and should be illegal. I hope they get sued over this. They should have honored the old licenses and 'gently encouraged' everyone to switch to sas with new features and support, not invalidating grandfathered licenses like they are slowly doing.
I hope those licenses last as long as you need them to bud, and what's happened to other shops doesn't happen to yours.
If that happens, Autodesk has breached the terms of our contract. Company lawyers are just itching for something to do.
That being said, this isn’t something new. 2019 was the last version you could purchase forever. That he’s just now getting around to noticing is hilarious.
you are missing the point. he is well aware of what you just stated. the thing that was 'just noticed' was his clients perpetual 2019 licenses just stopped working now in 2023, and they don't have an army of prepaid lawyers willing to fight the good fight against Autodesk's team of lawyers, as a small shop they were told to fuck off, they are shit out of luck. Autodesk will NOT honor their 2019 perpetual licenses for a copy of 2019.
No, I'm not missing the point. I have, under my control, perpetual hard license files for 2019. The company has already confirmed that we can continue using these licenses, on one machine per license, until the end of time or Autodesk's demise. The license files are picked up and transferred manually to the new machine. You don't "restore from a backup" because that's not how it works.
Personally, I don't think they had the licenses that Rossman and the company think they had. I suspect they were some sort of grandfathered upgrade license that indeed, did expire because it technically didn't cover 2019 as an install, 2019 was just the end result of upgrading that license.
So, I went and sat down with my IT director today over lunch and we discussed this very thing.
If you have a perpetual license, it stays perpetual. Autodesk will not supporrt you in any way. Period. This has been confirmed by myself, and pretty much every other person in the company that may have to deal with this issue. We own the license to this software, per the contract we signed when we purchased it it is irrevocable. This, of course, does not cover being unable to run the software on modern equipment, which will happen someday.
If, however, you do not pay attention, Autodesk will convert you to a subscription license. This expires, as they do not support 2019. I suspect, that at some point, your storyteller accidentally or unknowingly converted their license, or they simply did not have the license they said they did. Autodesk will do everything in their power to convert your licenses because money.
That's all there is to it. Someone doesn't have the whole story here, and it's Rossman.
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