On Friday 18 September 2015 20:52:34 John Dammeyer wrote: > This could easily degrade into a 'religious' discussion so I'll leave > it with these points. > > Clearly I'm not in favour of web based licensing. > > If I insert the Alibre distribution disk that came with the software > I purchased a few years ago not surprisingly that version will no > longer run. After all, 3D Systems bought it. The name changed to > Geomagic. Licenses are no longer available. Buy a new copy. > > The VisualCAM MecSoft plugin is being discontinued but at least the > VisualCAM dongle will continue to work with the existing dongled > version of the Geomagic software. Stuck in time but at least workable > while I have WIN-7 systems. Until the dongle fails. > I have some lengthy and unpleasant memories of failed dongles. We bought a rather expensive vlan based system from Ring Video Systems, down in FL. $25,000 for about $1500 in hardware, including a dongle we had to attach to the parport of the full box Amiga it ran on.
First dongle died in around 6 months, took some unpleasant phone calls both from us and a friendly attorney client of the station to convince them we had a fully licensed copy, so we were down and unable to edit commercials for about a month, costing us between 10 and 20k in production billings for that month. The replacement dongle died in about 5 weeks. Called them again, but the outfit had changed hands and they no longer had the ability to make a new dongle. I gave them 4 days to produce one so they went to the old outfit and begged the last surviving dongle on the planet from them. It worked for about an hour. I called and asked for a dongle free version, they hemmed and hawwed for several hours, and sent me a disk, overnite fedexed. But they didn't excise it well enough. So my next phone call told them that they were a bunch of idiots, and that I knew a guy in DE land who could strip it. They said we'll sue. I said that sort of threats from you, given the track record will be null and void in court and we will sue for harrassment and loss of services costs. Bunch of blather & name calling. I hung up in the middle of it and fixed a disk to send to DE by the fastest airmail I could round up. 2 days later I had that disk and a new one back, gratis, and it worked better than it ever had before until we had worn out the editing machines and had bought a pallet of Panasonic DVC-PRO's. And we were actually more productive with their editor accessory. The state of the art had indeed moved on. Now of course all that is done in digital on a hard drive or 3. And we never heard another peep out of that bunch of lusers. > I have a Quickbooks software package I had not yet installed and a > year later finally decided I really should change my accounting > system. Guess what. That software won't install anymore either. Too > old and the on line licensing has changed. No problem. Just buy the > latest for $. I presume that discovered a piece of your mind that was surplus so you had no problem giving it to them gratis? > So if I sound bitter it's because the promises and testimonials of > great support and ease of use vanish with the change in ownership or > model of a company. I won't be buying MACH4. I spent a day > re-aligning my CNC router because suddenly MACH3 and the USB SS > decided to run the Z axis past then end of the table. A Windows > Reboot made the problem go away. So now I'm looking seriously at > LinuxCNC. > > I don't expect LinuxCNC to be any better but at least if it happens in > 5 years the licensing model won't prevent me from fixing it. > > Five years from now MACH4 sales may be so poor that the company just > vanishes or is bought by a single supplier who drives it in a > different direction. > > John War stories, John. > > yes, The license is tied to a PC, but a hobby user is allowed up to > > 5 licenses per year. If your machine croaks you use the web site to > > issue a new license and the automated system mails it to you in > > minutes. There is no wait for a person to respond. As long as you > > are under 5 licenses its quick and easy. > > > > ron ginger > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >-------- _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
