Licensing Autodesk apps like Maya, Motionbuilder, and Max is an absolute pain in the arse.
Everytime I have to move a license or request a new one, I get that uneasy feeling that you get when you *know* you’re about to get screwed over and there’s nothing you can do about it. The maintenance fees are outrageous; it’s like paying mafia protection money. If updates were regular or useful to us, and support was even necessary or effective it would be fine, but paying maintenance sucks you into an expensive upgrade path you probably don’t need to be on. In my personal experience, the support isn’t much use to anyone except massive CG houses or developers who have over 30 seats. Would Autodesk look at feature requests from a small shop with 2 seats equally to a feature request from ILM?
I think it’s probably better value to keep your money in your pocket, and pay the upgrade fee when a new version comes out with a compelling feature that you actually need. I also have a problem with holding bug fixes back for release in new versions, rather than patching them with a point release. But then of course, you have to have a maintenance agreement to get the point releases….
Let’s look at some costs, using Maya 8.5 Complete as an example:
Node-locked (mac): £1999
Node-locked (dongle): £1999 + a dongle which is around £100
Floating: £2660
If you don’t have a dongle or floating server and you want to move a non-membership license between computers, Autodesk will do this for you, but it’ll cost you £109 a pop. This is despite the fact you’ve already paid £2000 for the license, and it used to be free. How could they seriously justify charging £109 to do this? Worse still, it can take 24 hours or more for the change to go through (I have no idea wether they will invoice for this or expect payment up front). If I want to move a license, the chances are I need it because a machine’s died and the artist has had to move to a new desk, so it can’t wait. If I have to pay this premium, I want it done now.
I honestly can’t see why they don’t give all customers the ability to run a floating license server free of charge. It’s basically shilling us, squeezing every last penny out of us that they can, which I find a little bit disrespectful; make licensing so difficult to manage that customers are compelled to pay the extra £700 per license, and then have money fights in the office. I’m pretty sure giving the float server away as a free option would cut their administration overhead, would definately make the customers licensing obligations easier to manage.
This business model is clearly working for them (and many other companies, I’m just using Autodesk as an example), so I don’t expect any changes, but I can definitely bitch about it. It seems that it’s either suitable for a small team with 1 or 2 users, or a very large team with 20 or 30 plus. For a mid sized art team like ours, and a single IT guy trying to keep all the plates spinning, it’s just shit. And don’t even get me started on Adobe!
Here’s a theoretical way to get dongle functionality for cheap:
Node locked licenses that are not locked to a dongle are locked to the network card mac address of the particular computer - mac addresses (are in theory) globally unique IDs, and so also make handy unique system identifiers for things like node locked licensing schemes. USB network adapters naturally also have mac addresses, and are equally as portable as the USB dongles. So in theory, you should quite easily register your license to a USB network adapter, and just swap it between computers as necessary! Easy.
Luckily, the technology we’re working with is pretty much agnostic when it comes to file formats, so artists can work with whatever app they are most comfortable with. For our next project, we’ll be looking at standardising the art team on one app, and it probably won’t be max or maya.