Next, take 20% from customers using SW to design their products.
I’ll charge Dassault 50% for this idea.
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I posted it here some time ago, but when you go out maintenance before SP5, SW will take away your permanent network licenses, splitting your serial number into a bunch of single, node locked licenses. 30+ serials for 2025 sp2 and another bunch for simulation professional sp3 (but to use them we have to match the cad license so scaled back to sp2…) and flow that we will never use because there is a deadly bug in simulation that kills your result file and it was fixed with sp3…
Couple scenarios:
- free downloadable add-ins. How amount of downloads are verified? If somebody just tells to SW that no, no downloads, 0…
- what if somebody wants to be an a**hole and makes automated downloader…let’s say that free add-ins is downloaded 50x per day. It’s 1825000 eur/year. Surely small companies can pay..
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Now all the simple 10 lines macro will need 10000 lines to phone home to keep track of usage, install, uninstall.
They will simply start to ask for money to use API.
Macros are excluded.
For now
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“beatings will continue until morale improves”
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Hi! Does anyone knows what this would mean for open source frameworks line SolidDNA or xCAD?
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That brings up the obvious elephant in the room of how do they enforce this stupid policy.
Obviously their “Partners” have some sort of contractual binding, but as you say, there is a goodly about of SolidWorks based FOSS out there.
Wouldn’t surprise me to see some sort of “key” required for anything other than a VBA macro to run. And you would have to kneel at the feet of the Dassault diety to get the key.
Kinda like the current Document Manager Key.
I suspect it is more a preliminary step to force everybody on the pLaTf0rm™ making the on premise version of SW too painful to maintain.
Obviously DS is too optimistic: our anger management is quite at its limit. 
I remember one of the big marketing points the VAR used to snare us into Solidworks was the huge eco-system of third party tools by VARs and SW Partners that supported every custom need. It’s true, Solid Edge had/has much less third party that Solidworks did, so it got the attention of a couple of my superiors. I mostly make my own tools; I cannot say that without mentioning Jason Newell and the other greats on the SE forum. I digress.
Point is, Dassault appears to be ham-stringing, or flat out killing off, the very things that made SW better than the other economy solid modeling systems.
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