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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Those small chicken grown big and SW killing them for the eggs.
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I wonder at what point they will realize that customers have plenty of options other than Dassault products.
Not until we accept the cost of switching to a different software. So far I haven’t been able to justify that to myself, much less the other owners.
Switch cost is high once you figure training, efficiency hit while users come up to speed, conversion costs and possibly paying for two apps for a period of time.
I’m sure the cost to switch varies by use case. I can tell you that in our case we will never see the ROIs that the VAR convinced us of. They simply didn’t understand our CAD usage well enough to provide good guidance on that. …or they knew but were more interested in getting the sale, I don’t think so though. We’re five years in and still working on getting everything remodeled well in SW. It’s like changing the wings on a plane while the plane is in flight.
I will not be part of a 3D CAD system change again.
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I have no plans to switch. I’m set to retire at the end of May 2028, and after that they can do whatever they want to here.
Yeah, really depends on your product lifecycle. If you develop products that have short lives and are replaced by entirely new products every few years, you could probably switch cad tools for a new product.
Our products are maintained for decades. And new projects just replaces a small assembly component in the much larger whole. So after decades the entire product might be considered “new” compared to the original. We would have to remodel everything. Did that once 27 years ago, not easy and we were a much smaller company then.
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