Cloud-based licensing and/or software distribution is a complete no-go for any studio working on a lot of major features. The new security requirements that have been imposed on vendors by some of the major studios are extremely unforgiving. I really hope we don't see VFX software heading exclusively in that direction or they will be "innovating" themselves away from most of their customers. At the very least, both licensing models must be allowed to coexist.
The only way Adobe software can be used is if you buy enough licenses for them to grant you use of a local license server (I think the minimum requirement is 15 CC licenses). -Nathan From: Jose Fernandez de Castro Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2014 10:11 AM To: Nuke user discussion Subject: Re: [Nuke-users] unimpressed and moving on I think that the future of software piracy protection is going to be precisely the Netflix model, which is to stream the software and run the services off the cloud, with local storage and some processing, of course. This is going to happen, whether we like it or not, and even Adobe has started testing this with Photoshop for chromebooks. Some services, like Nvidia's Grid are already doing it for games. Of course software such as Nuke, which is disk space heavy and computationally intensive will be a challenge to implement under this model, but they might figure it out. Not saying that I love the idea, but it might be an alternative to all this licensing issues and might also make software such as Nuke more affordable. On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Elias Ericsson Rydberg <[email protected]> wrote: As much as all these annoyances are valid, I do feel the need to play the devils advocate here. Nuke wasn't designed for freelancers and shouldn't be treated as such. It was made for use in a studio. So when you bring the software on set or out of the house, you'll have to work around that limitation. This shouldn't be a surprise, the requirements says it needs a server for licensing to work. On the other hand, TF could be more accommodating in this regard. It's 2014 now. Maybe offer a license server in the cloud so it's reachable through the internet. Let's say you register the MAC-adresses of your computers and the server could only serve licenses to those machines. And if you are a studio and need to have a license server on site for speed and redundancy. TF could potentially offer you to set up your own cloud host that could serve licenses on site and to on set operations. Or a hybrid. So if your Internet connection goes down, the studio can still be served licenses from the local server. The few studios that have multiple locations could potentially have one license cloud spread over multiple servers for redundancy and speed. I can also envision that these license servers could be able to lease licenses to the seats and have TF bill you per hour/days/months instead of having a fixed number of floating licenses in your pool. This would offer studios to quickly scale up from 20 to 100 seats when they land big jobs. And then scale back down again when they wrap. If would also be very interesting if the licenses could be leased from your server to external cloud rendering services as well. Or lease licenses to freelancers or sub-contractors? Ultimately it comes down to money of course. But TFs poor treatment of its existing customers, in this aspect, isn't defendable. I'd say these licensing problems could be solved by technology instead of harrasing phone calls. Adobe have rather successfully deployed their cloud licensing model and I'd be flattered if The Foundry did the same and built upon some of my ideas above. TL;DR: Make licensing easy, customizable and reasonably priced and studios and freelancers will stay with until death. Piracy is best fougth by providing better solutions. eg. Netflix. Cheers and excuse my ramblings, Elias Ericsson Rydberg Answering social issues with technical solutions since 1990
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