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.
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.
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