Gotta love the use of quotes here:

it should be treated with "utmost importance."

In other words, ignore this message from our lawyers.

If the uni has a license what's the issue lol

Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

As a french, please don't give a penny worth of licence to Dassault Systèmes. They were founded by some of the worst ennemy of the people my country made.

Thumb of rule is, If you don't make enough to comfortably pay for some software; you simply don't pay for said software.

PhD students as well as all students of all levels need to use pirated software to fully develop their abilities.Trash this warning.

If it's on a students personal device, they can suck my hullabaloo

Pro tip: Always use a program like binisoft windows firewall control

Look at companies like this. The software KNOWS it has been cracked but instead of disabling itself it sends home your info so you can get sued for copyright infringement

Ps: I'm curious to know the price of the geovia suite. I'm guessing it's a subscription and I'm guessing it's more than 10k per year

That is some next-level Minecraft you are playing over there

That reminds me, I got a very threatening email from my college in 2000s about downloading movies and that they traced the IP to my laptop, and I could be paying $10k in fines, have this on my permanent record and/or expelled.

I loled and pirated a lot more safer.

Still waiting for them to follow up with that 20 years later.

Imagine using pirated software and allowing it to go online. Loco 🤯

We also had expensive engineering software at university. Oftentimes it's a major PITA for everyone. The PhD students have to get their work done and are met by the software refusing to start because all licenses are taken. Sometimes someone forgot to log off or the computer crashed and the software takes most of the day to recover that license. Or some people do like 5 simulations in parallel. Or lock the computer, go home and block a license. The IT department will get lots of calls and have to deal with it. Especially when the pool of licenses is small. And it takes additinal effort to coordinate practical courses and excercises where you teach a group of 24 people which then need half the license pool available at a fixed time each week, despite the daily routine of everyone else.

And I'm not even sure if the people responsible, care too much for pirated software. But they're liable. Of course they write strongly worded mails when talking to everyone. It's their IT infrastructure and they can't have people do illegal things with it. Especially not while having an expensive contract with some supplyer. They can't have anyone leak a mail where they endorse piracy. Or post screenshots or turn in assignments or papers with screenshots that say "unregistered copy" in the bottom corner. And once students do silly things and the piracy is on display publicly, they'll have to do something. Usually that's writing a strongly worded email first. Because that takes next to no effort. I think the usual IT department doesn't care as long as things go smoothly, people do their various things and no one complains. They usually have other stuff to do. That makes me think in this story something must have happened that warranted some form of public reaction or at least show they addressed it and they have it in writing.

And I think the rest of the mail fits such IT people. They said why they do it and that they can't have piracy connected to the institutes name. They say they need some incoming complaints to justify buying more licenses. And the punishment fits the crime. They just disconnect the computer from their network and it's not their problem anymore. I think that's fair.

It should be treated with "utmost importance", not with utmost importance. That ending is quite subversive!

So thry're saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can't requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don't overbuy.

I would hope they're not using static IPs and MAC address spoofing is a thing.

Shucks... Maybe if the college didn't rob the students blind on tuition, and the publishers not rob the students blind on books, maybe they could afford to pay for software licenses. 🤷‍♂️

they should have put dorm numbers on there so you could meet some cool people. sharing is caring.

How did they detect it? Did these people install the pirated software on devices owned and managed by the college, or did they use their personal devices and only connect to the network? Anyway, they definitely should have used a VPN.

not sure about the majority of the software but I'd recommend FreeCad as an alt to Solidworks

• I've heard they're about to hit their 1.0 release sometime in the near future

Some people never learn. My Academy requires students to log in with their university account, so they know who does what.