Some people never learn. My Academy requires students to log in with their university account, so they know who does what.
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.
Dassault absolutely deserves to rot in hell right next to Adobe
Storytime, please?
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 pirated solid works because my university’s engineering program required what we PAY for it to complete our courses that absolutely required it.
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
I’d like to know more
Sorry to answer a little late,
Dassault is a group which covers multiple company, the most notorious is “Dassault Aviation” which sells warplanes like the “Rafale”. But it is also implicated in a lot of other activities like infrastructures and road work, press, informatics, etc. The company is very close to the government because it need public contracts to work, it can’t sell planes without it being a contract between France and the country who buys it. Which is very problematic because Dassault has interest in influencing exterior politics of my country to sell it’s planes. The head of Dassault company in the last few decades is Serge Dassault, Billionaire and French Politician. S. Dassault has used his influence and power as a media owner and elected regional politician to promote his business.
On the politic side he was a right wing politician, leaning to the far right. He made some homophobic statements during the discussion about same-sex marriage stating that homosexuality in ancient Greece was “one of the reasons for its decadence” and that “there is no renewing of the population. We’re going to have a country of Homos. There will be nobody left in 10 years. That’s stupid.” He was also publicly anti-union (which is honestly pretty rare to be claimed publicly in France) and against the right to go on strikes. He said that he admire the Chinese work organization.
He was brought to the court several times :
- For concealing during 15 years millions in other countries.
- For rigging elections by buying votes in 2008. His election was canceled and he was sentenced to 1 year of ineligibility. He went around it by making one of his partner, Jean-Pierre Bechter, elected. In 2013, Mediapart (a french independent newspaper of investigation) released an audio of S. Dassault claiming he spent 1,7 million of euros to elect Bechter.
I am not an expert on this and a lot of what I am saying here is documented on his French wikipedia page about his politics view and his legal problems Much more can be said but it is a beginning to understand what I meant.
Serge Dasault is now dead but his children are all at different responsibility positions in the Dassault group. Here is a map of who owns the medias in France (last updated in December 2023) where you can see what Dassault owns, it seems to be less than when S. Dassault was still alive, for exemple until 2006 they also owned “L’express”
Thanks for the detailed answer!
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.
Fair enough
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.
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
they should have put dorm numbers on there so you could meet some cool people. sharing is caring.
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.
PhD students as well as all students of all levels need to use pirated software to fully develop their abilities.Trash this warning.
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
Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions
It really is, but what can do? Capitalism exploits everything for profit.
Well obviously, seize the means of production?
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.
On my uni we also had licenses, their ratio per students were somethibg like 1:10.
Not only shitty, it’s dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It’s how they get new users on the hook.
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.
Yeah, that’s really unfortunate. I think the market would be way more dynamic innovative, and secure if such large packages would be foss. Larger companies can have their own full or part time specialists, and smaller ones can put out bounties etc
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.
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
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
Well, Solidworks is the industry standard, but I think NX wins on capabilities, and Fusion has a much better workflow. Both are still corporate though.
I hope we get a good open source option, because Freecad is so far behind the rest that it’s basically unusable.
Forgot about NX, but you’re correct NX has more features and is way less buggy
That is some next-level Minecraft you are playing over there
These mods have gotten ridiculous!
Mine and mine related accessories
I’ll tell ya hwhat.
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
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. 🤷♂️
Adobe did the same in my friend’s animation college
