Cubify Design is being retired

[Michael Anton]

So in case people don't know, Alibre has reformed as a new company, and bought the rights to the Cubify Design and Geomagic Design products.  These were both originally Alibre Design, before they were sold to 3D Systems.  I mention this here, as the FirePick Delta was designed using Cubify Design.

Today, I was informed by a salesperson at Alibre that they are planning to retire the Cubify Design license server by the end of the year, so according to him this means any installs of the software will cease to function.  I'm finding this a bit hard to believe, as I was under the impression that this software doesn't phone home in order to maintain a license.  Has anyone with a Cubify license heard the same thing, or been approached by Alibre to upgrade?

The good news is that there is an upgrade path, and if you act quickly they are still offering a pretty good deal on it.  If you whine enough, they may even give you an upgrade to an offline license, which will never expire in the future, and doesn't phone home, so it doesn't require any specific servers to exist.

[Jason von Nieda]

For what it's worth, I just called 3D Systems, which is who I bought my copy of Cubify Design from, and they told me they were not aware of any changes to the status of licensing for the product. They no longer sell it, but they said licenses should continue to work.

Maybe this only applies to people who bought Alibre Design from Alibre?

Jason

[Michael Anton]

I got my copy from Sherline initially, and the product was called Geomagic Design, but it was under the control of 3D Systems at the time.  Sometime later this changed to Cubify Design.  Alibre did convince me to upgrade based on their claim that it would stop working at some point, so I hope they are not just claiming this incorrectly as a marketing ploy.

What do you currently do from a licensing perspective if you needed to move your copy to another machine?  If this requires a call to 3DS, that will probably no longer work, since they can no longer do anything with the product.

[Jason von Nieda]

Hi Michael,

I bought mine as "Cubify Design" from 3DS, in Sept. 2014. The PDF invoice is from 3DS. So that's who I called this morning and they said that they have no intention of shutting down the license server because it uses the same licensing system as the rest of their products.

I have a 32 digit alphanumeric license key that I have to enter when I install the software. I'm not sure if it phones home or not. I don't have a reason to uninstall/reinstall it and I don't want to risk it, so I'm just relaying the information I've found.

I've mostly moved over to Fusion360 at this point, so for me it's mostly just a matter of being able to open my old files for anything I haven't yet converted.

Jason

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[Michael Anton]

Thanks Jason.  That is different than mine then, as I have this great big monster code that has to be copy/pasted.  The upside is that I have the equivalent of the expert version with all features unlocked.

I guess I'll just have to see what happens then, though I'm covered either way, but I'd need to upgrade my OS to move to their new product, since I'm still running XP for legacy reasons (don't laugh).

Just as an aside, for those that are interested in upgrading to a more recent version, all Cubify customers qualify for an upgrade to Alibre Pro if they pay the $300 maintenance fee (there is another option to upgrade to expert too).  If they haven't contacted you directly, feel free to email them at sa...@alibre.com.