Free for EAA Members: SIEMENS SolidEdge CAD

[DNytes]

Meagan and Eric: Thanks so much for keeping us informed with regards to SolidWorks and SolidEdge. The EAA just may have saved itself a membership with this news.

However Dassault's feet should be held to the fire with how utterly poor SW Maker installation and HotFixes installs are processed. What a debacle...

[Voyager]

This. I spent some time learning Solidworks, drew up some cool stuff, and suddenly my files were worthless. Sure, they'd load in other tools, but they couldn't be edited. Eventually bought another product, but it worked enough differently that I really didn't want to face the learning curve again.

I finally got the veteran deal for SW, so I've got it again, but still have a bad taste in my mouth. Been off SW long enough that I feel I'd have to re-learn it all. Haven't felt too enthusiastic about that. I think they're less likely to pull the rug out from under veterans, but just can't get fired up about using it.
Attachment 9477

Ron Wanttaja

You read my mind. I spent probably 80 hours learning and starting to use SolidWorks when they pulled the rug out. I am now trying to do the same with SolidEdge. The main difference I have found is that SW had many great tutorials on YouTube. One community college professor basically put one of his courses online and it was fantastic. I have yet to find the same for SE. I found the tutorials disjointed without logical flow and the few tutorials I have found on YouTube seem to suffer the same. I have found nothing remotely equivalent to what I found online for learning SW.

[CharlieN]

I am also one who had a real bad time with the SW scam. I had partially machine parts that one day later I could no longer run the machine leaving me with expensive scrap.
I am not stupid enough to fall for this crap again.
I started drawing on Autocad 2, we only had DOS systems then

Plus being a very short time from turning 70 and with a rather low income from being scammed by an accountant decades back I will stick to Auto Cad that I am still very comfortable with it's limits.

I also no longer put much faith in the Post Paul P EAA and how members are treated.

[DaleB]

I don't really blame EAA for Dassault's actions. I suspect there was an expectation on their part that offering the deal to EAA members would increase sales of the full priced version of their software, which probably didn't happen. Used to be you bought software, or more accurately a permanent license to use it; now pretty much everything is moving to an annual or even monthly subscription as companies explore how to extract the maximum amount of cash from their customers. This is all based on the fact that there's an expectation that all of our devices are always connected to the Internet, so they can control licensing and usage in real time. This is only going to get worse.


So like I said, I don't really blame EAA here -- but by now we should have learned that if the software company can pull a Lucy and yank that football away, they most likely will. Unlike Charlie Brown, I won't fall for it again.