Lets say you pirate CAD software like Autodesk Inventor or Dassault Solidworks.

Which company is more aggressive toward pirates? Which software is more dangerous to pirate?

For example I heard Adobe is pretty lax about piracy and it’s usually no big deal if you pirate Photoshop. So I wonder how it is with CAD companies.

I have seen a lot of posts about people receiving letter from Dassault about pirated Solidworks. But not so much about Autodesk. So I wonder if Autodesk software is safer to pirate than Dassault software.

Thanks for any advice or experience.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    You can never share any of the software specific formats ever (.ipt for inventor, .dwg for Autocad, .sldprt for solidworks, etc). All those formats include fingerprints inside that are not user visible or modifyable but include detailed info about the copy of the software license that created it. If anyone else ever opens those with a legit copy, the software itself phone home about it and they’ll know, because whatever license the pirate copy shows will not exist on Autodesk/Dassault/whatever’s side.

    Platform agnostic formats likely embed this kind of Metadata too somewhere, but it can probably be stripped, and most of the time when sharing an agnostic for.at like .step/.stl the opening software is not made by autodesk or whoever.

    Finally it could just legit be a user report. Companies like autodesk have a reporting system to send evidence of suspected pirated software use directly to their legal teams. It doesnt happen often but if youre using like a 7 year old copy of Inventor and something feels off… yeah. So you’re never truly safe if you have to share your models at all.

    • young_broccoli@fedia.io
      0·
      5 months ago

      Damn you proprietary software!!!

      Thanks for the info. Seems like it would be safer to use librecad to create and autocad just as a reader/converter. Why people accept this, do this formats offer advantages over the open ones?

      Edit: Sorry if im asking too many questions

      • PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        In most commercial software you can create a sketch, draw a shape, extrude it out, cut some holes in it and it stores it in an ordered tree. You can go back and change the first sketch and it’ll go back through and update the resulting model. If you export that as an open format you only get the result of all those steps - you lose the instructions the software uses to create them.

        You can do other things like have parameters. You could make a sketch and have dimensions defined by a statement dim2 = dim1 * 5 sort of thing. When you update dim1, it would also update dim2.

        I don’t know where OpenSCAD fits in here. I should play with it a bit. I suspect scripts can be written to behave very similarly.

        There’s also a lot of other shit crammed into commercial formats - materials, drawings, stress analysis and other shit we wouldn’t normally need.

          • PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            0·
            5 months ago

            Most of it is focused on corporate shit. Integration with ERP packages and full manufacturing data. They also host a lot of plugins that sometimes work out mostly okay lol. NX has python scripting which I’m a fan of at work, but I mostly use models at work so I’m just using it to get access to a python interpreter.

            If you look up the release group solidworks (if they’re still around, ru cad focused) they release a lot of random modules for the different CAD packages.