Gotta love the use of quotes here:
it should be treated with “utmost importance.”
In other words, ignore this message from our lawyers.
This whole message reads like “we don’t actually care but we have to say that we do 😉🙂↕️”
Yep, the legal team advised a scare tactic akin to ISPs fishing for low-effort compliance. Reminds me of CAMP & the ATF busting farms in Mendicino until the '10s.
I often tell my students “whatever you do, don’t go to libgen dot rs to download our textbook illegally. You’re gonna want to avoid Anna’s archive as well. You really want to steer clear from these malicious websites.”
that such infringements do not occur on the campus
Some people use quotes for emphasis, though. So, not sure if this faculty’s on our side.
If the uni has a license what’s the issue lol
Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions
The uni doesnt care. The software vendor does and is threatening the uni for not being compliant.
Ik
Not only shitty, it’s dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It’s how they get new users on the hook.
I’ve been using Jetbrains products for free in college and I can say that it is the best advertisement. I bought it the day after my student license expired.
Ehh even when I was in school I used foss like blender and gimp. I’ve never had an actual copy of 3dsmax, Maya or photosoup. Been plenty productive with that my entire life.
Sure, but that’s far from a universal experience.
Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions
It really is, but what can do? Capitalism exploits everything for profit.
Some software uses license servers where each client is supposed to request a seat temporarily. If more people use it at once than seats were licenses they detect that with phone home features. We had that with Matlab I believe, if you tried using it in the most popular time you might not be able to.
As a french, please don’t give a penny worth of licence to Dassault Systèmes. They were founded by some of the worst ennemy of the people my country made.
yea I would like to second that. Not sure how many FOSS alternatives exist for mine design & planning though
I know one for mine crafting…
the only phrase in GEOVIA’s manual : never dig straight down
I’d like to know more
I am not French, but tried to look it up. I couldn’t find anything except him being a billionaire which should be enough.
This guy is smart unlike American clowns… Low profile.
SW was great to use back in uni but holy hell is it full of phone home stuff and really annoying these days, I scrapped my license, they straight up wouldn’t let me cancel within 30 days of renewal so I yanked my cc and “cancelled” that way.
Use FreeCAD, mentioned in a few posts, it’s got some clunk but it’s 100% useable, has more than enough features for prosumer/hobbyist use, personally I’d make an argument it’s fine for enterprise use too, Ondsel seems to think so considering that’s the market they’re targeting with their releases. I’d recommend the Ondsel release or Realthunder’s (what I currently use) which has features/fixes that will be merged back, and 100% look at mainline freecad when the 1.0 release drops
Storytime, please?
Dassault absolutely deserves to rot in hell right next to Adobe
I would hope they’re not using static IPs and MAC address spoofing is a thing.
usually college networks have a Mac address whitelist, so you need to turn off Mac spoofing in order to connect
Imagine using pirated software and allowing it to go online. Loco 🤯
Thumb of rule is, If you don’t make enough to comfortably pay for some software; you simply don’t pay for said software.
Yup, this is why I didn’t pay for REAPER until the check for my first audiobook came through!
I’m still waiting for that check from the author, but you best believe $60 of it is going to the software that made that job possible!
Preach
Shucks… Maybe if the college didn’t rob the students blind on tuition, and the publishers not rob the students blind on books, maybe they could afford to pay for software licenses. 🤷♂️
It should be treated with “utmost importance”, not with utmost importance. That ending is quite subversive!
PhD students as well as all students of all levels need to use pirated software to fully develop their abilities.Trash this warning.
How did they detect it? Did these people install the pirated software on devices owned and managed by the college, or did they use their personal devices and only connect to the network? Anyway, they definitely should have used a VPN.
These softwares use your pc’s network connections to send data to the servers which then checks whether you paid a license or not. When they can’t use your internet connection, they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares such that if you send the file to someone else who has a license they will unknowingly rat on you through their connection.
When they can’t use your internet connection, they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares such that if you send the file to someone else who has a license they will unknowingly rat on you through their connection.
This sounds evil, possibly violating some EU laws too.
Ok then use a firewall like https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall (I assume that this was on Windows) to block these apps’ internet access. There are other good options like the Safing Portmaster (which also works on Linux), OpenSnitch (Linux) and LuLu or Little Snitch on macOS. There are many more options for Linux, iptables, nftables, firewalld, or ufw with a GUI like gufw.
they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares
In that case, I’m using a VM where there is absolutely no information about me
I would absolutely use a VM with no internet connection for these, but then all bets are off if those softwares need direct access to GPU, for example. GPU passthrough is a thing, but I haven’t had much luck personally.
I have a w11 KVM with a 4080 passed through it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be
I highly recommend you try, it’s sweet
So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?
Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.
As usual, service problem.
So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.
Pro tip: Always use a program like binisoft windows firewall control
Look at companies like this. The software KNOWS it has been cracked but instead of disabling itself it sends home your info so you can get sued for copyright infringement
Ps: I’m curious to know the price of the geovia suite. I’m guessing it’s a subscription and I’m guessing it’s more than 10k per year
Or a firewall that doesn’t rely on windows firewall, since programs will just whitelist themselves from it during installation
I didn’t encounter a single program that bypassed the block applied by windows firewall control - after setup they usually don’t have the admin rights anymore to control it
It’s pretty common for programs to add firewall rules for themselves during setup. If you rely on manually blocking them after the fact they could have called back home already
Tinywall is great and free.
That is some next-level Minecraft you are playing over there
Adobe did the same in my friend’s animation college
Are there any opensource alternatives to these things? Could they save themselves this whole hassle, just get the alternative and cut their budget in half with a yearly donation?
Can’t speak for all of them, but for solidworks there is, but it is nowhere near the level of solidworks.
SolidWorks is probably the best CAD software in terms of capability and ease of use.
Either way, students learn SolidWorks because companies use solidworks
