Open letter to Autodesk support

[vzagainov]

Hi all,

First of all let me say "Thank you" to all of the Support and Development team members working on this Fusion360 project. I've enrolled into Fusion360 startup subscription three years ago and it was a good ride so far, not without bumps, but quite enjoyable in the process.

Fusion360 helped me to learn basic CAM principles and helped me to get into manufacturing world. And I really appreciate this opportunity. It was very slow process, as I'm still employed as Software Architect and wanted to start manufacturing business on a side. All I had is my evening time which I can spend learning these manufacturing basics and I had some cash to invest. My other backgrounds are electronics, embed programming, cloud development, gunsmiths and I'm quite experienced with other 3D programs, like Rhino, 3DMax. Fusion was somewhat easy to learn in 2D space, but I really struggled to do something in 3D space. When I started learning Fusion there were no 3D sketches and even now they're far away from other modelling software. (I still can't draw more or less detailed 3D spaceship in under 4 hours without struggle, but was able to do that in Rhino, yes, I get it, Fusion and Rhino are different).  

This year was a tough one to everyone. My startup operations were literally ceased due to Covid-19, but I was able to keep my main job and continue to invest into my business. I also decided to switch my main business activities from being a small prototype machine shop, which makes small to medium batches to producing my own goods. Which has taken me into another journey of designing something I can really sell.

The R&D process for that involves prototype drawings, CAD work, CAM work, then embed software development using arm C/C++, then PCB development, supply chain work and that list goes on and on.

Last couple of months I didn’t turn on my mill at all. Since spring time, I had zero online orders to machine parts and I was full speed ahead into firmware development and other R&D related activities. Well, I have forgotten that my three-year startup subscription is going to be over soon. And it did expire. And I never did it to 100K annually.

All right. I get it. It is my fault. I’m not here to complain about this. My first business plan failed, my failover business plan needs more time to get mature.

The question was what to do next. Get a subscription? Seem like I missed recent opportunity to get 40% off for three-year subscription, I was simply busy doing some other stuff and didn’t pay attention to this promotional email. 80$CAD monthly? Pre-paid annual subscription?

Before doing anything else I tried to do something with my Fusion files. Good job, development team, they’re entirely locked. Well, you can claim otherwise (“we don’t own your files!!!”), but it seems to me that leaving Fusion platform is not going to be an easy way either. Exporting Fusion files to some other format (I tried Inventor format) does not work. Well, it exports only visible parts of my work, and as you can guess I have a lot of components inside, most of these components aren’t visible hence they cannot be exported (it seems to me that Fusion can only export what was visible with the last save, and because saving is no longer permitted all invisible components are locked until paid access is granted).

In software development it’s called “personal data lockdown”. Whoa. Well, I hope this wasn’t done intentionally, I was just exploring my options and leaving Fusion was one of these options.

Then I went to a forum. And then I noticed a topic which has been removed just recently (or I simply cannot find it anymore). That topic was about recent licensing changes and most affected were personal and hobbyist users of Fusion360. I read the entire topic and decided to write this open letter.



This open letter is not about my personal struggles. I’m a big boy. I can afford paying my bills, no matter what. This open letter is about Trust.

And if @keqingsong  is reading this I’d point on some of the events happened in the past. He must remember these events. Remember, how brilliant was Java language in the past so we even had hardware accelerators for this language installed in mission critical servers? “Write once run anywhere” and “billions of devices running Java” motto? Well, everything was running good until Oracle acquires Sun and all of the sudden Java license agreement started seeing massive changes. One step at a time, bit by bit, and nowadays Oracle sues all business entities for Java usage if possible (that’s including Google and Java for Android). All more or less talented developers and enthusiasts have left Java community looking for better development opportunities. Once young, vibrant and thriving Java community is no more.

Same story happened with Microsoft, then they started abandoning their developers and if you ever spent some time doing .NET development you should know what I’m talking about. Silverlight – gone, WPF – gone, cross platform .NET Core – too late, there was no point to stick with Microsoft anymore. We, developers, been paying subscription fees for MSDN and still arrogant software giant decided to piss on us all. Our time investment has been depreciated with declaring major parts of .NET framework obsolete and no longer supported.

I’ve been doing both, Java, .NET and in both cases, it was Broken Trust issue. At some point you can’t rely on a tool and that tool provider and you have to switch to something else in order to continue to earn money. Yep, you can still find Java developer positions today and also .NET developer positions but these are no longer #1 programming languages in the world.

Since then I’m doing Open Source software only. Brilliant community, tons of support and most of Open Source projects are thriving. Yeah, what we see today is Microsoft begging us to return to Windows platform development, “we’re not your enemy!” Github acquisition, VSCode given away for free, they’re trying hard to get us back and look friendly to us.

Well, long story short, what happened between Autodesk and its community just recently is the Broken Trust issue, as I see it.

People were precisely right saying in the comments, that they have been participating in QA activities for free, writing these bug reports for free and experimenting with new Fusion features and now they’re facing these licensing changes. And these changes are limiting their access to their _time investments_ while people were helping Autodesk to cut on _development time_. Directly or indirectly but you have to admit and acknowledge that.

Again, this is not my case, but I’m siding with Autodesk community here. As history likes to repeat itself and have seeing these patterns in the past, I’d like to say to every Fusion user – BEWARE. This is very disturbing sign to a guy who is working in Software industry for almost 30 years (and I started developing as a kid when personal computers were a luxury).

Kudos to Fusion development team, they’re currently undergoing forum survey regarding access to personal projects and such but I think that should not happen in the first place.

A grateful community is hard to earn but easy to lose due to a broken trust and other restrictions. If major part of community will be forced to leave Fusion due to these or similar issues over next couple of years then next couple of things are going to happen:

• The user feedback will be significantly decreased as most commercial users do not have enough time to properly report software issues, they simply _hope_ that somebody else will take care of these bugs
• Fusion will see significant drop in popularity and less and less users (i.e. potential buyers) will be attracted to this CAD/CAM software
• And then eventually Fusion users will start seeing software degradation, broken patches, slower and slower customer service responses etc etc etc, because CAD/CAM hype will go somewhere else

Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that many times before.

I understand, there is probably a push from Autodesk investors to do such a move, but please, Fusion Development Heads (I’m looking at you keqingson), please fight back and do not allow this happen to Fusion360.

For most people Fusion is no more than a helper software to create simple 3D models which could be printed, and they simply don’t need all these multi-axis CAM features at all. Many don’t need rendering, and only a few will see some value in Generative Design.

Having said that, I think pricing scheme for Fusion360 is not giving its user base enough freedom of choice. If Autodesk investors expecting people to start paying 500usd annually just to print more than 10 different plastic toys, then they’re just as blind as my knee.

For God’s sake take a look on Adobe, which is offering no less complex software in any means and it is far more mature and stable. They have offers for everyone, and the most popular digital photo processing software called Lightroom is available for 9.99usd/mo and 119.88usd/prepaid annually. Not every one will ever need Adobe Illustrator, but if you‘re into vector graphics, you can have it for another 20usd/mo. If you’re all around painting ninja you can have it all for 60usd/mo

My guess this is somewhat internal restriction at the moment but with more and more modules plugged into Fusion there will be a need to have more flexible feature configuration in Fusion one day or another. Electronics people don’t need sheet metal, sheet metal people don’t need CAM access etc etc.

And if you can configure Fusion setup to avoid software updates for all modules integrated into Fusion, and only update those being licensed for this user that will significantly cut on traffic on both consumer side and Autodesk side. And that probably will make Fusion _more stable_

Fusion stability is somewhat troublesome to me. You know, when I pay to Digital Ocean cloud services I expect these services to work. Because I can roll out Kubernetes application there and some high Availability web store running and I do expect it to work 24/7/365. If there will be service outage, Kubernetes scheduler will take care of this and my web store will continue to work without interruptions. And I gladly pay over 100usd/mo for that.

Comparing that to Fusion, which is of course good CAD/CAM software but

• Quite often it hangs, I thought its my hardware, now I’m running 32 core CPU and nope, it hangs all the time when I change some of my large projects. 30 sec freezes, black screen and non-responsive UI, and I’ve seen other users been reporting the same, but this issue stays unfixed
• Crashing on Mac like crazy in both CAD space and CAM space. Not sure what I would do, if not these smart background saves which were helping me to recover from a crash
• I’m still covered with a cold sweat because I remember that bug which was affecting CAM Passthrough commands.
• Drawing in 2D Sketches sometimes laggy as hell, does Fusion request a permission from a remote server each time I draw a line? Duh…
• Copy pasting some assembled component from one file to another, and BOOM, that component loses all its joints and all component parts are flying in the air until you save this file and reopen it. And then BOOM, it all works fine. (? A broken timeline issue ?)

I can continue my rant here, but you got the idea. 80cad/mo for this? Let’s be honest here, I’m not quite sure how Fusion dev team has organized their TDD (Test Driven Development) around Fusion internal functions but this is far from the ideal. I can definitely say that there is some serious lack of memory profiling on Mac platform for sure, and if they have some unit test framework in place, which helps them to control their development, then that framework will require a lot of polishing.

I’m one of those users who don’t need Fusion on a daily basis. I can plan ahead hence I think it is a good idea to compare their monthly rates to monthly rates of similar services and not their annual plans.

And, guess what, all I can see here is that Fusion monthly price discourages people to use paid features on occasional basis, i.e. paying upfront is the only option to get a reduced price. Considering software stability issues at the moment I don’t think whoever was working on this pricing plan had an idea what he is doing.

Autodesk Sales, listen: monthly prices must be encouraging people to get onboard, so people will eventually start paying upfront and start saving here and there. You lost me on this one entirely as I’m not aware of any Cloud storage service or Cloud computing service which is becoming cheaper if you pay upfront. You pay for your usage and that’s pretty much a Cloud Software industry standard at the moment.

Machinist’ crowd and people from other industries using Fusion at the moment may not be aware of that, but this is hard fact – if you pay upfront for Fusion360 to get a reduced price this is not a discount, its just your monthly price being gouged by Autodesk Sales to encourage you to pay upfront and show better looking revenue reports.


Bottom line:

My little startup decided to stay.

Partially.

I’ll pay for the subscription, but for a month or two. Will spend that time moving my work out of Autodesk Cloud. I will keep occasional access to Fusion because I like Generative Design idea and would like to try it one day or another. But for every day’s work I decided to use something else and for me this is not the question of _AFFORDABILITY_.  Comments like “you can afford 32 core monster CPU then you can definitely afford Fusion costs” please leave these aside. You’re knocking wrong door here.

Fusion PROS:

• Very good and user-friendly UI, I’d say I felt in love with this
• Some truly unique Cloud native features like remote rendering and generative design
• All-in-one software bundle idea, which helps to go from prototype to production in a very short period of time
• Manufacturing extensions are looking quite promising
• Cross platform (with a grain of salt…)
• Many will say that Fusion provides very good value comparing to other CAD/CAM software packages  and I tend to agree here

Fusion CONS:

• I’m one of those Open Source fanatics and decided not to support Autodesk with my money because I’m siding with Fusion hobbyist and enthusiast community on this licensing issue. Big red flag here. Simply don’t know what to expect next from Autodesk because I’ve been in these waters before and I know what I’m talking about
• Software stability, while its not killing me, I’m quite surprised that after last 5 years of development there are still serious glitches and often crashes.
• Broken price scheme which is going to damage this product long term unless they will review and change it by making it more modular and flexible
  
  
  

I provided this open letter to Autodesk and its community because I want to see two things in the future:

• I wish Autodesk will thrive along with its community, and that union will thrive for decades with more and more people joining both community and commercial users
• I also wish that Fusion will become an affordable standard de facto in our schools, universities and small businesses. This software has very good potential

Hopefully users who was abusing Fusion usage will recognize that software costs money but also Autodesk will stop punishing community people and will get out with something more creative than just 10 files limit.

Well, 😊 this 10 files limit is not coming from Cloud storage constrains Autodesk is currently having because of your files, as you may thought, absolutely not. With an average Fusion file size being around 1Mb you can store approximately 250.000 (two hundred fifty thousand) Fusion design files on High Availability Cloud S3 storage for just… 5$/mo….

Peace to everyone.

Thank you.

[keqingsong · Accepted solution]

Hey vzagainov, 

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. On behalf of the Fusion 360 team, I want to let you know that we’re taking your feedback, as well as everyone else’s, very seriously. The changes we’ve made to the Personal Use offering has not been something that we’ve taken lightly. We understand the impact it could have on the hobbyist community as well as the trust we’ve built throughout the years, and that’s why we’re doing everything we can to be transparent, open, and honest with you. We are listening and want to engage with you so that we can continue to help you succeed at what you do.  
 
I want to expand on a couple of points you mentioned and see if I can provide some clarity, beginning with your export experience. For the record, we do not own your data, nor do we want to keep your data hostage. You own your data for as long as you have an account with Autodesk, and you can access through Fusion Team even if you stop using Fusion 360. What you experienced with the invisible components while exporting your document as Inventor format is true - I verified this on my end and noticed that invisible components are left out of the export translation. I don’t know the reason for this, and will investigate with our development team on why this happens. I understand your frustration though, because compounded with the fact that your license has expired, you cannot go back to a previous version and turn the components on since your document is now in Read Only mode.  

If you haven’t subscribed to the paid version yet and really need to get your documents out of Fusion 360 right away, I propose that you re-apply as a startup and export your documents as needed (based on what you mentioned in your post). We’ve made significant updates to our startup enrollment and entitlement, so it’s worth checking out if you’re still trying to grow your business. Here’s how to apply.  

As noted in our recent 10 document limit blog post, this change won’t happen until Jan. 2021, so should you choose to renew as a hobbyist (Personal Use offering), you will still have time to export to Inventor format without issues. If you haven’t read that blog post, then please do check it out, as I think it’ll give you and everyone reading this a better understanding of what the experience entails. Our goal for the limit is curb license abuse from those using the free hobbyist offering for commercial purposes, and at the same time, avoid negatively impacting true hobbyists as much as possible. 

Again, thank you for your post and your feedback. I’ll be sure to share this around the team. If you run into issues renewing, feel free to reach out directly to me via keqing dot song at autodesk dot com and I’ll be happy to help you out.  

Cheers, 

[vzagainov]

Hey @keqingsong 

Thank you for taking the time to personally respond to my open letter.

Again, kudos for listening community members and doing constant improvement to the product!

Thank you for your clarification regarding access to my data files after uninstalling Fusion, that was one of my never asked questions, but I’m glad to know that data persists in Autodesk Cloud even if I will stop using Fusion.

I also want to bring more clarity on the topic of data ownership as I definitely can see how you approach my words and I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough on what I meant by saying “Autodesk owns our data”.

I didn’t mean legal or intellectual ownership, that’s common misunderstanding for most people when data ownership is discussed between tech people. Rephrasing my own words, I can say it was rather a term describing where my design data is currently stored and we all know it is stored not on my raid array, not on my premises etc etc. Its stored somewhere else and I may eventually lose access to it, and that may happen intentionally or by the accident.

And I can assure you, I’m in the same boat, explaining our customers on my day’s job pretty much the same – we don’t own your files, we don’t know your passwords, we don’t have access to your sensitive information etc etc. Unfortunately for us these are financial institutes and our software is always facing strict security requirements namely known as PCI and GDPR from every new customer.

So, _technically_ speaking if my data is stored somewhere else then I don’t “own” my data. Some remote datacenter has it, in some cases my data could be spread among several data centers to avoid data loss, but again, the “data ownership” and “data safety responsibility” in someone else’s hands.

And when data lockdown or data loss happens (usually by accident), not only it’s a big frustration for the user who relied on that cloud storage, but also it’s a cloud provider who takes a hit towards his reputation.

Glad my case helped your team to identify yet another problem, this time with exporting files. Once issue is localized it becomes just the matter of time to fix it.

Thanks for the advice though, I will check out new startup enrollment conditions tomorrow morning and will re-apply. Will not renew using Personal Use or Hobbyist offering though as I’m just trying to use Fusion to grow my business and want to keep things open and fair (don’t even know what’s the difference between these three offerings btw).

My apologies for not seeing this “10 document limit” blog post earlier. Working 14-16 hours every day leaves not too much time for reading. But I read it very carefully now and … Hmm…  I must be reading too quickly through that other thread, where people were bashing Autodesk for such a decision.

Interesting. Now I don’t even think its ethical to continue discuss technical reasons behind this decision, as I don’t think it’s a space limitation anymore. Its rather looking to me as a counter measure to prevent specific usage behavior which is not even obvious to me right now. As a startup user I have many files, soft jaws, fixtures, prototypes at various stages, but even in these conditions I’ve never seen a need to write to multiple files. 3-4 files opened for the reference, and then 1-3 files where I’m doing actual changes. That’s my typical behavioral pattern in Fusion. 99% percent of my files are rarely seeing any changes once completed. Have to admit that this change should work for most hobbyists. Unless people are working with dozens of smaller files for some strange reason? My files are usually well organized but relatively large (…and that’s probably what is causing UI freezes).

Well, I’m not going to easily retract on other issues! 😊 Unfortunately, they’re still valid, and I stay my ground.

While I can understand better now where this 10 files limitation is coming from, licensing terms were still changed. Another case is recent acquisition of EagleCAD, which is currently being integrated with Fusion. Once beloved by electronics community I can observe that more and more people are going somewhere else for the same reason. People are not fleeing but walking away one by one. Of course, I don’t have access to Autodesk internal stats, and it may be that situation is quite the opposite, but this is at least what I read on hobbyist electronic forums.

Hence, I still believe that better and more flexible price plans working along with better software modularity will help Fusion to earn more customers. That might be something not that easy to implement due to earlier design decisions but I believe it’s worth trying.

As for software stability I think I can provide somewhat better input re technical issues described in my previous post. Once access is regained I will get back to this forum with better detailed bug descriptions.

Not sure how to help with Mac crashes thou. At some point I even decided to use my virtualization lab, run Fusion instance on KVMs VM, then run a Kubernetes pod with rVNC  + Ingress controller and access that Fusion installation remotely via web browser over HTTPS connection, and that works pretty well,  however, I cannot say this is a recipe that everyone should try in the first place to overcome crashes on Mac platform.

Anyway, thank for your response. Deeply appreciate it.