Is there a place for Open Source Projects in the new F360 Licensing scheme?

[JustinSB]

Hi, I have spent the past year working on a Fusion 360 design for an Open Source Project. I have put in over a thousand hours on the 3D Design side of it whilst the other team members involved with the project have written our website, wiki and software. We are just about to launch and release our work to the community for free – but Autodesk has now changed the structure of the licenses and I am really scared that all of my work will be lost.

We no longer fit into any of the new free categories and we can’t afford to buy Fusion 360, so I fear that we will have to stop using it, and that I will have wasted the past few years leaning how to use Fusion 360 and advising everyone concerned with the project to jump onto the Autodesk band wagon.

What license do we use?

We don’t have a Company or a company address, & I don’t have a work phone number. My existing Hobbyist Fusion 360 license is tied to my own, personal email address, as I set it up long before this Open Source Project even existed. We don’t match any of the available Corporation Types in the drop down menu and we don’t have any Employees, because nobody has a contract of employment – because it’s an Open Source Project & we all do everything for free. We especially don’t have an Annual Revenue – because it’s an Open Source Project that’s just about to launch.

So, my question is: how do we move forwards on this, and has Autodesk left all the people involved with Open Source projects out in the cold.

I can’t just fill out the form to apply for the Fusion 360 for Startups license, because I would have to lie on the form, as it isn’t designed for our kind of application. I can’t apply for a Fusion 360 for personal use license, because all the work that I’m currently using it for is for our Open Source Project and we may possibly generate money at some point in the future. So, right now, I’m just really, really worried that we’re going to lose everything that we’ve worked on over the last year.

Please advise...

[James.Youmatz]

Hi @JustinSB ,

I may not be the best person to answer this and I will try to connect you to someone who will. To do this, I better need to understand how you fit into this model.

You say you may receive money. What does that mean? If you are not selling anything per being open source, then you would qualify for the personal license. Per the personal qualification page:

Screen Shot 2019-10-09 at 1.03.18 PM.png

In any means, your data will not be lost! It will be there, you just may just need to eventually purchase a commercial license if you are using Fusion 360 commercially per the terms above! The data will still be there though.

[JustinSB]

Hi James, thank you for responding.

Firstly, let me say how relieved I am to hear that there is no chance of our data being lost. There is a whole year’s worth of my blood, sweat & tears stored in that cloud account, and I have been very worried. Whilst I don't really care what flavour of license I end up with in the end, my overriding concern is that I am & remain 100% legal in my usage. I wouldn’t want anything to come back on us later. I am also firmly of the opinion that we are eligible for some kind of (currently) free license.

We are in a startup scenario, and are a few days from going live. There is a core group of five people running an Open Source project. But because it is an Open Source project, we have an ever growing community who also help out. There is no money involved at the moment, but in the future we may end up getting funding by mechanisms such as Patreon. We may also cut deals with AliExpress suppliers on components and the like. There is also a possibility that we may sell stuff ourselves eventually, to facilitate the Open Source stuff that we have released. In my opinion, there is (hopefully) a decent chance that there might be over $1000 involved in the first year. However, it is very unlikely that we will make over $100,000 per year for quite a while, but if/when/as soon as we do, we will naturally be buying a commercial Fusion 360 license for our designers (right after the Champaign).

I really don't feel that our project falls into the category of a "non-commercial personal design project", or even "home-based non-commercial manufacturing and fabrication", so although I’m not a lawyer, I don’t feel that a personal use license is right for us. If it was just me, doing my own thing, then yes – but it isn’t.

It would appear that your Startup License is what we need, and should be eligible for, but your application form is specifically not designed to cope with who we are and how we are organised! However, discounting the fact that we are not a business, and have no paid employees, we do have less than 10 core personnel. We also “generate less than $100,000 USD in total annual revenue” – again, discounting the fact that currently we don’t actually generate any revenue whatsoever. Naturally, we are definitely though more than willing to share our story with the Autodesk Fusion 360 community, along with the rest of the Internet, as soon as we unveil everything to the world - so apparently we theoretically tick all those eligibility boxes for the Startup License.

We just can’t fill out your form. We don’t have a business address because we don’t have any business premises – or work telephones for that matter. In terms of your question on Corporation Type, we aren’t a "C Corporation", an "S Corporation", a "Limited Liability Company", a "Nonprofit Organisation" or a "DBA", so we can’t answer that one either, and as I mentioned earlier, we don’t have any employees or an Annual Revenue yet.

To be honest, it looks like we really should be eligible for a Startup License, but your form needs tweaking a bit...

Hopefully you can find out who needs to look at this for us to sort it all out.

With Thanks, Justin

[prainsberry]

Hi Justin,

You have raised a very good point we are thinking about adjusting that dropdown right now.  I think there is definitely a strong case here, and I would very much like to have some provisions in here to support open source projects.  Would it be possible for you to DM me your email and we can have some further discussions?  I would like to understand a bit more about your project and how you actually structure the work.  I think that would help me to define the appropriate definitions for our application form and possibly to update the terms a bit.

[JustinSB]

Question, just so I can get my head around your requirements? Are your Business requirements mutually exclusive?

Who is eligible?
Businesses with 10 or fewer employees.
Businesses (including parent entities) generating less than $100,000 USD in total annual revenue.
Willingness to share your story with the Autodesk Fusion 360 community.

By this, I mean, would a Business with a total annual revenue of $50,000 USD but which has 15 employees qualify?

How about a Business with 3 employees and an annual revenue of half a million? Whilst this doesn’t apply to me, it’s not really clear at all, and if I don't ask, someone else undoubtedly will?

Your Free Fusion 360 for Startups page goes on to say:

Qualification details
Fusion 360 is available for businesses who are:
Venture-backed, angel-backed, or bootstrap startups.
Using Fusion 360 to directly support their own businesses for the design
or manufacture of new or innovative products.

Again, what if you are a Bootstrap Startup with 11 employees? Does that disqualify you because of the 10 or less rule, or qualify you because of the Bootstrap Startup rule?

What about my case, where we an Open Source project? We don't have any employees at all, but we do have a very fluid number of participants. But how do we count our participants? Just because someone helps out for a few days on the Wiki & then gets distracted & never comes near the project again, should they be counted against the 10 or less rule? Are we therefore instantly disqualify for ever, because of our Open Source community forums and the fact that anybody can help out if they want to, even though there's predominantly only me that's been doing the Fusion 360 work so far but there are other people dropping in and out doing the software, the wiki and the website? Or do we get blanket coverage qualifying us because we are definitely a prime example of  "Using Fusion 360 to directly support their own businesses for the design or manufacture of new or innovative products" - which is fabulously inclusive, legally wide open, and definitely describes us. Or are we just covered because we are also counted as a Bootstrap Startup?

My advice, given that you have a huge community of active users, would be to ask the community! Ask them which bits don't make sense, ask them to tell you what's missing, ask them to tell you what's wrong...

Naturally, as you asked, I have PM'd you my details & will do everything I can to help so that we can get your new licensing program easy to understand & simple to apply for.

[JustinSB]

For those of you following this thread, Patrick reached out to me via email & has promised that Autodesk are "looking for the right logistical approach" so that their new licensing system can cope with all the other groups of people that it needs to. Further details were promised by early next week, so a big thank you to Patrick & Autodesk for listening to the issues that we raised.

[Swarfmaker]

This is exactly where I have been coming from in my other posts.

I am archiving old engineering designs for a group of interested individuals and have been doing this since the inception of F360. There is no product or income stream - nor will there ever be and so I have been using the free personal license. All those who have engaged with me have also been using the same free license. Although used rarely, when needed the ability for those other people to join the project to comment and modify the development of a historic design has been important. This is likely to be more so as the project moves forward. However, under the new license scheme, 'Personal' license users will be denied the team working and any call on a range of file translators.

Thus, as it currently stands, there is no place within the license structure where we can logically reside.

I do hope that as a consequence of your discussions that something can be resolved.

[JustinSB]

@SwarfmakerI think that this is why the process needs the fallback of being able to ask a real person - with that option clearly laid out so that people who don't quite fit within the guidelines, but who clearly match the spirit that the free license scheme was devised for, can see that they just need to discuss it with someone like @prainsberry who can rubber stamp them.

[Swarfmaker]

Has there been any progress with this?

[mroek]

If their decision to disallow collaboration with a personal license stays put, then I think the only option is to work sequentially. In other words, one person does some work, and then exports the design as an archive, which is then shared with the others that work on the project.

Very cumbersome, but possibly doable as long as only one person works on the project at a time. The design archive could be shared on any site that allows file sharing, but again, only one person can work on it at a time, since merging design archives is not possible.

Using github and file locking *might* be possible to allow one person to lock the archive while working on it.

[Swarfmaker]

Agreed that is a solution for simple sequential changes but having been 'sucked into' F360 sharing capabilities it is a blow to have it summarily withdrawn. There are so many of us non-profit users (and I don't mean personal necessarily), that have contributed to the de-bugging and improvement of this software, albeit for no charge for the use, that it feels to me that Autodesk has been disrespectful toward us. As always though, it is the accountants that control products, not the folk who are doing their best to assist us all through the support forums. Respect to those individuals!

[prainsberry]

Hey,

Sorry for the delay on this thread, as you can imagine this has been a busy couple weeks 🙂 

I have been circulating some ideas internally and think I might have a good solution, but still need to do some more validation.  I am very confident we will have a solid solution here soon.  Just give me a little bit of time to get some things sorted.  If any of you that own the hubs for an open source project are coming to the end of your existing startup entitlements in the next couple weeks, please reach out to me personally and I'll see if we can get you a short term solution while we work on a broader solution.

[JustinSB]

Thank you @prainsberry & don't forget that you can reach out to any of us too, to see what we think of the ideas that you have been working on. Much appreciated, as always.

Justin

[prainsberry]

Excellent, I will do that as soon as I get a bit more clarity on the possible solution.

[JustinSB]

Hi Patrick,

Do you have any updates for us?

[JustinSB]

Hi @prainsberry 

Has there been any progress? It's been two weeks now, and we haven't heard anything back from you yet. Fusion 360 is still hassling me to renew my license, & I still can't use the form because it still isn't compatible with the Open Source project that I am a part of. Could you contact me please to tell me what is happening?

Justin