I’m seeing multiple recent complaints from people stating that their older but perfectly legal perpetual license AutoCADs are being broken. They’re also reporting that Autodesk is being less than helpful about fixing the problem in any reasonable kind of timeframe. Whether this is a deliberate act or yet another “this won’t happen again” screw-up is difficult to determine, but either way it’s pretty obnoxious. People paid a lot of money for this software and they deserve to have it working.
If you have an old release lying around for whatever reason, maybe you’d better check to make sure it’s not broken.
Autodesk, if you can’t get your licensing act together, I hope you’ve budgeted enough to provide full refunds to everyone with an old license. Millions of them. Thousands of dollars each. That’s quite a few billion dollars. No? Don’t have that in the piggy bank? Better get cracking, then.
To those people stuck without a working AutoCAD who need to get work done while fighting Autodesk, regular readers of this blog will be able to tell you know where to go to get 30 days’ relief. File under told you so.
Has this happened to you? Please comment and provide the details.
Hi Steve,
Could you please share where you are seeing any Autodesk customers not able to access their perpetual licenses? All old valid perpetual licenses should continue to work. I am happy to help anyone right away, if you are having any trouble at all. I can be reached directly via our forums here: https://autode.sk/2LHviM5
Regards,
Matthew DiMichele
Autodesk – Social Media and Community
Hi Matthew, thanks for reaching out and offering to help. I will point them at your comment and encourage them to get in touch.
Here’s one example, let’s see how this one turns out:
https://twitter.com/RGCADMan/status/1024335723116281856
You can buy older version perpetual licenses legally as part of acquiring or merging with a company. 2016 is the last version to be sold as a perpetual license. I bought some licenses in 2016 from a company in bankruptcy, and the transfer was approved by Autodesk. I may be able to help you find some network multiuser licenses that can still receive a license file from Autodesk before they shut down their activations in 2016, and they could be installed on a virtual server so they would be good forever.