ocad licence

[seabird]

From ocad

2. Software Registration and Activation
Owing to numerous infractions of the license agreements (illegal copies
of OCAD), in future OCAD 9 (Demo,
Standard and Professional Edition) must be registered and activated. We
regret having to take this step very
much for our loyal customers. OCAD AG reserves the right to take
further legal action!
There are two HowTos about OCAD 9 registration and activation at
http://www.ocad.com/howtos/68.htm and
http://www.ocad.com/howtos/69.htm

Never a great issue before the planning tool came about. How will or do clubs manage this? Does Condes for instance have the same issue, or can it be shared easily between planners in the same club? Do not incriminate yourself. Ocad may be watching.

[DaveR]

We use OCAD on only one machine at a time which is a royal pain when we have more than one potential user. The new license seem even more restrictive - we will not be in a hurry to upgrade!

CONDES has a club license which is much better. To quote from the CONDES website:

"A licence for Condes version 8 is issued to an orienteering club so that all club members can use Condes for your club's events, i.e. a club needs only one licence, and you can install and run Condes on more than one computer as long as the licence is used only for the licencing club's events."

[The Loofa]

From ocad

Never a great issue before the planning tool came about. How will or do clubs manage this? Does Condes for instance have the same issue, or can it be shared easily between planners in the same club? Do not incriminate yourself. Ocad may be watching.

This is certainly a big issue
We have a Regional coming up and we have one club member updating the map and another planning. They cannot work without it being on both machines. So I hope OCAD is watching as I would like a practicable answer please

[Gross]

At Scottish 6 Days two years ago we used CONDES. The mapping co-ordinator sent copies of the map out as updates were received from the mapper. Planner plannned using the CONDES file as did the controllers. There was no need for anyone to have OCAD at all.........

[seabird]

[We have a Regional coming up and we have one club member updating the map and another planning. They cannot work without it being on both machines. So I hope OCAD is watching as I would like a practicable answer please

I'm sure Ocad would say get 2 licenses of Ocad. However the reality is for many (most?) clubs many events are being planned, maps drawn and coaches planning their sessions simultaneously. Multiple licences (comfortably in double figures) would be required.

I feel in the orienteering world ocad may be on loser here, as this is obviously an incentive to purchase Condes for those who don't have it, and an incentive to not updating Ocad when the next version comes out. In our case where much of the mapping is done in Illustrator it could even prove in the longer run better to abandon Ocad altogether.

[Paul T]

OCAD might also say that the planner should use the free demo version, but that has restrictions on the number of courses which make it unusable for standard events.

This comes at a time when we were thinking about upgrading from O8 to O9. The new licensing arrangement is so harsh for our club's many-but-infrequent users that it now seems almost a no brainer to move to CONDES instead.

[IanW]

About 18 months ago, we (MDOC) became concerned about this as we estimated that as many as 20 people might want to use OCAD in any one year (using it for evening, informal, permanent courses etc.). We also estimated that maybe 3 people would want to use it concurrently for a large event (mapper + 2 planners). We therefore contacted OCAD and suggested that we would be prepared to pay something of the order of 3x a sinlge licence cost for a club licence. We believed that this was fair and would avoid potential problems. All we got back was a terse "we do not do club licences".

So, we have moved to Condes for planning which, in any case, is a better tool and the authors are much more responsive to suggestions for improvements.

However, we will still have a need for OCAD. Does anyone know how the new licence operates? The conditions still suggest that it can be moved between machines as long as only one copy exists. However, will this require on-line re-registration each time? Is the PC ID built into the activation key and if so by what mechanism? Might it be possible just to keep it on a memory stick and run it from there on different machines?

Ian

[FatBoy]

It does look like they're shooting themselves in the foot somewhat.

They say you cannot use a licence concurrently on 2 PC's but how often do clubs who share one licence amongst many PC's actually use it at exactly the same time. It's not realistic to expect you to uninstall it for a couple of hours while a club mate installs it then uses it to print off 10 maps for an evening event.

Some sort of online licensing might be good. When you start up the software and every (say) 5 mins it checks to see if that licence is in use elsewhere in the world. You would have to have some sort of offline arrangement - maybe connect your computer to the internet and say you wanted to take the licence offline, then at some point elect to put the licence back online.

The USB stick is a good idea. OCAD could even sell the software on a USB stick in such a way it wouldn't work if copied off it - that would keep them happy. I know some other software is being sold in this format - e.g. http://www.multi-edit.com/mobileME.php It still would be far away from being able to dip in every now and again into the software for use for printing off a training map etc.

If they are reading this (or perhaps somebody accidentally points them toward it...), then it would seem sensible they change tack in some way or other. A club licence would seem the sensible way to go though. Other software (hmm I wonder which?) works on a club level as it's the only sensible approach.

[redpossum]

It is not a new licence at all but has operated as far back as I can remember (OCAD 5). The only difference is that you now have to activate your licence to receive the latest updates or, presumably, to activate new copies. For the full licence agreement in OCAD see Help> About OCAD> License Terms.

OCAD would probably have been better in their quest to reduce illegal copies by issuing club licences at extra cost (but not as much as a full copy) to allow the programme to be loaded on multiple computers. As it is I think CONDES will benefit.

[DJM]

I have been in touch with the OCAD people recently and they are very much aware of the high expense of using OCAD just as a planning tool. As a result, they are currently developing a sort of "lite" version to be called OCAD CS specifically for planning purposes (they call planning "course setting", hence "CS"). The aim is that this will be much cheaper than the Standard version, but details of the pricing structure are not yet available. More details are expected in their next newsletter.

As a commercial concern, OCAD very understandably want to prevent unlicensed use of this new product as well as existing products, and will be using the new registration and activation procedure to supply the control they require.

In the meantime, if a club concurrently wishes to use its licensed copy of OCAD for both mapping and planning purposes, I recommend they get in touch with OCAD to discuss how to do so. They were very helpful to next year's JK planning team where the three clubs involved have two or three JK planners (course setters) as members.

[Paul Frost]

It's all very well having a planning version but I think you still need to be able to modify the map.

What about those minor map corrections that you discover whilst planning?

When you come to print the maps for the event, you need to be able to move the titles, key etc. around to make a space for the control descriptions.

If you print maps at different scales (1:5000 for the white/yellow say) you need to be able to edit the text that shows the scale.

The presentation of the map is part of the professionalism that we are trying to convey

EckO is a very small club with an active group at each end of our area, so we have 2 licences, but even this is not going to be enough as we expand the number of people planning events. I also have 2 computers (laptop & desktop), I have OCAD on both at the moment as I thought it was quite acceptable to do that as I can only use one at a time, it will be pain if I can't even do that.

[Angry Haggis]

I think that OCAD badly needs a viable competitor. Competition breeds innovation and value!

I've had a go at producing some maps in the past using Adobe Illustrator CS3 and the free MapStudio plugin. The problem here of course is that Illustrator is even more expensive than OCAD.

Hopefully someone somewhere is beavering away writing a freeware/shareware/cheaper/more flexible/more standards-compliant orienteering mapping package. Maybe the tech genii of Nope Industries LLP are working on such a product?

[Adventure Racer]

Probably easier to work on cracking the OCAD activation

...anyway can't see any features in OCAD 9.5 which would make me feel the need to want to upgrade, so just keep on using non-activated versions. The real crunch only comes if and when they introduce a new file format.

[IanD]

Some sort of online licensing might be good. When you start up the software and every (say) 5 mins it checks to see if that licence is in use elsewhere in the world. You would have to have some sort of offline arrangement - maybe connect your computer to the internet and say you wanted to take the licence offline, then at some point elect to put the licence back online.

The USB stick is a good idea. OCAD could even sell the software on a USB stick in such a way it wouldn't work if copied off it - that would keep them happy.

Online licensing seems a very sensible and user-friendly solution, particularly as it doesn't require a physical object to be passed around.

The USB stick idea doesn't really allow for the way orienteering clubs work, members tend only to meet at events, how long before the stick gets lost in long grass at a car park?

[Adventure Racer]

Online licensing seems a very sensible and user-friendly solution, particularly as it doesn't require a physical object to be passed around.

Indeed - if it's done properly it takes less than a minute to register or deregister a licence. You can even set it up so that you get a licence when you run the software and release it when you shut down, so no user intersction involved whatsoever, but this still ensures that only one person at a time uses it, which is how I understand the OCAD licensing terms. Surely a system like this would keep people happy (along with the use of the demo version to view maps when you don't need to modify) - assuming of course that those using the s/w have internet access!

However there doesn't even seem to be a means to deregister at the moment - OCAD do allow you to move a licence, provided you're not running on two computers at the same time, don't they?