ArcGIS Pro - Is this the start of a revolt against ESRI

[NigelBerjak]

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

[NigelBerjak]

Thank you everyone who has participated in this debate and I would like to send out the message that ESRI have listened. I received an email from Rob Elkins​, Product Manager at ESRI towards the end of June who said that ESRI were working on a solution to the licensing concern that most people had, with respect to ArcGIS Pro. What he said, which is still being finalised but becoming more official, based upon his email to me on 10 July, is that while ArcGIS Pro is still going to be based upon an up-to-date maintenance agreement, if you should decide to stop this maintenance, for whatever reason, you will be able to apply for a perpetual license directly from ESRI, so you can continue using ArcGIS Pro, for the life of the OS and machine it is situated on. I am not sure if that license will be transferable to a new machine, which hopefully it will as we all know how machines seem to die on us at the most inopportune moments.

The link from Rob at ESRI, which begins to detail the plan, is UC Q&A | 2015 Esri User Conference if you want to read it. As quoted from his email to me,

Basically if you can’t renew your Maintenance there will be a license file you can use to keep using Pro at that version on one machine

I would like to commend ESRI in this instance as they have listened to users and made pretty swift action, as large organisations go, to remedying the issues that were laid out from everyone.

Another addition, which I am sure will please everyone, is that as of ArcGIS Pro 1.2, concurrent use is going to be introduced. Hopefully it will not slow machines down too much, but that is something to discuss in the future.

Now I feel much better about starting to properly tinker with the current ArcGIS Pro and its possibilities.

[JimMcKinney]

I think conversations like this provide valuable guidance,  we take them seriously and appreciate the various viewpoints.   And,  they can result in Esri better serving our customer’s needs,  this is always our goal.    We are listening to you,  sometimes we just can’t accomplish what you ask for quickly or maybe at all,  but sometimes,  we can.    Thank you for your input,  we hope to keep the dialog going in GN,  other communities and events,  and of course in person at the Esri UC if you are able to make it this year.    Its always a great motivator for Esri folks to see what innovation is taking place using Desktop software and the entire ArcGIS Platform.

-Jim