I have to raise a glass to Autodesk for supporting students and educators by making its software available free. Further props are due for removing the virus-like educational watermark.
A further program that Autodesk supports is the FIRST robotics competition series, helping to develop young people into technology leaders; a member of my family has benefited directly from that.
Credit where credit is due, Autodesk deserves praise for supporting education. Of course, Autodesk will ultimately benefit from this support, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Doing good and being smart are not mutually exclusive.
and many other things too, like their excellent API’s. I also love the educational versions of acad as I can teach my kids and their friends the program without much trouble. Its a good move on their part and they need that considering other wonderfulness going on.
Never Mind Autodesk’s program, BricsCAD has a great academic program, my son is studying Architecture at Universidad Veritas in Costa Rica and all he had to do was to log in to the web page, register and provide a copy of his active student ID. No hassle, no watermarks to stain/diminish his homework, his professors and classmates are now looking at it as a possible substitute. From your description of “educational watermark” http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2009/04/17/autodesk-assistance-program-and-the-educational/ Autodesk’s program seems more like a trap for capturing unsuspecting perfectly abiding users in a bad moment, many students are doing internships and chances are they will try to open files they should not with their student version without harm being in their mind nor in the mind of their patron and Autodesk’s glorified program could end up having that kid kicked out of the office for doing what students do and that patron paying fines for being supportive of the educational community. Not really my idea of support
That problem has been gone for several years. The educational watermark no longer plotted in AutoCAD 2014 SP1 and re-saving the drawing in 2015 or later will remove the stamp.
Jose, Steven mentioned what I was going to, but your comment indicates something interesting. I have found that once you go with Bricscad, you stop caring about Autodesk as much, and maybe therefore staying current on their latest changes. Maybe not, but that should tell potential Bcad customers how good the product is. Saying that is also a compliment to Autodesk and I want both to compete forever.
whoops, Steve, not Steven…