Raster Design 2010 network license

[clbreinholt]

Our firm has subscribed to ARD with a single network license for a few years now. Autodesk's policy has always allowed the network licensed version of ARD to run with a standalone license of Autocad/Civil 3D/LDD. With the release of ARD 2010, Autodesk has changed their policy so you must either own stand alone licenses of both or network licenses of both. The cost of this change is either $15,000 or $21,000 depending on the direction of the change. Autodesk did not notify any subscribers (as far as I know) of the change in policy, nor did they tell my reseller (I suspect all resellers) until somebody had problems and they had to call Autodesk to find out.

I urge each of you who are angered or affected by this change to speak out. Autodesk has such a monopoly on the market, that companies will be virtually forced to shell out the extra money because of a change that was executed on their subscribers without notification and without fulfilling an implied promise that subscribers would be able to pay a certain fee for continued service of the software as purchased.

It seems that Autocad could be liable for antitrust lawsuits if these types of policies continue.

[dgorsman]

I seriously doubt this is an "evil empire" issue. In fact, other posts I have read indicate that it's just an oversight on the part of AutoDesk. What, you've never screwed up something?

[cadtag]

agreed that this does not seem to be a policy change -- chalk it up to poor qa/qc and minimal testing on the part of autodesk. much more important to get have flashy bling in the product than to verify that products actually work as customers expect.

I do agree however, that multiple customer complaints to autodesk would be a good thing. A lack of negative feedback will only encourage more poor performance on autodesk's part.

Antitrust? nah... there's some competition in the desktop cad market, so monopoly status does not apply.

[rkmcswain]

With the release of ARD 2010, Autodesk has changed their policy so you must either own stand alone licenses of both or network licenses of both.

No they didn't. It was a programming error. Not sure if it has been fixed yet however.