

So, when you get a software audit letter from Autodesk, what happens? A former customer, who has legal copies of AutoCAD, but no longer uses them, decided to test The Man after receiving this email presumably from the company:Īs part of Autodesk's on-going License Compliance Program, your company has been selected to undergo a software compliance audit to ensure that your organization's installation and use of Autodesk products and services is in compliance with applicable Autodesk licensing agreements. In any case, for pirates free beats paying $2,000 a year for a piece of software that barely gets updated annually (as compared with some competitors). But then the cloud didn't work out well technically for software as complex as computer-aided design, and so most CAD software continues to run on desktops.īut who knows how many of the illegal ones actually get used I have all kinds of freeware and cheapware on my computers that never or rarely get used. One reason CAD vendors were so excited about running their software from clouds was that the technology would instantly eliminate the problem of pirating. He had hoped to convert pirates to customers by switching from permanent licensing to annual subscriptions, a line of thinking that never made sense to me. Customers fear software audits, for if you are innocent, the audit is a monumental waste of time, and if not, then fines and, depending on the jurisdiction, jail time.ĭespite this, Autodesk failed to crack its problem with software piracy, with the ceo acknowledging at times that even now there might be 3x more illegal copies of AutoCAD out there than legal ones. To replace it, Autodesk set up an anti-piracy department, and wrote terms into the end-user license that even today allows it to send agents into your private home without a warrant to scour for copies that might not have been paid for.
Autodesk crack version cracked#
The lockdown was a near-instant disaster, as (1) the hardware made it difficult to print drawings (due to interference with the serial port used by most printers and plotters at the time) and (2) the code was quickly cracked by third parties. So with version 2.5 in 1986, Autodesk began its decades-long (and unsuccessful) crackdown on copying by initially adding a hardware lock. When it launched AutoCAD, Autodesk was lauded for the cheap price ($1,000), the ability to run on many different kinds of personal computers, and being customizable - rare at a time when traditional CAD software could cost $100,000 a seat, ran on proprietary hardware, and could not be customized by users.Īlso, making copies of it was easy.
