Well, before I head off for the weekend, I was reviewing some other comments and located one about the licensing of ArcGIS Pro. As many of you likely thought, ArcGIS Pro was going to be available with your standard purchase of a new ArcGIS product, or with an upgrade. It seems ESRI has put a dampener on my weekend and making me once again review my allegiance towards them, by making ArcGIS Pro an online only license, like Adobe Creative Cloud or Office 365. As with these, if you stop paying your annual maintenance agreement, the software stops working.
I have been advocating ArcGIS Pro and learning to use it, however with this new knowledge, I have to once again rethink whether I want to invest my time and effort into this product. The long term consequences for me, as a small GIS firm owner, is that should I stop my subscriptions, I will lose my layouts, scripts, projects, full use of my data (although the data can be retrieved from other forms most likely) etc. etc. I think anyone considering ArcGIS Pro should be concerned about this license strategy as ESRI are now locking you in to a lifetime of using their products. It once again appears that the giant is trying to assert its authority without taking everyone's opinion into account. Added to this, as it is anticipated that ArcGIS Pro will replace ArcGIS in years to come, where does this leave any of us, once support is stopped for even our old faithful. Are we going to need to run ArcGIS versions within VMWare environment, just to ensure that we can access our own projects and work?
One big issue that seems to be felt by the early adopters and testers of this product is that the lack of transparency is so severe around the licensing, that it has left what may be an indelible and permanent scarring on us. With the likes of QGIS, MapWindow, Cesium and all the other open source GIS software and tools out there, is this going to be the beginning of a revolt against ESRI, purely by pushing their legal customer and consumer too far.
To read the various reviews and dialog, please visit the original postings at the link below:
ArcGIS Pro License : Subscription license - will expire when maintenance stops
