Licensing for Altair Embed Basic

Altair Forum User
Altair Forum User
Altair Employee
edited October 2020 in Community Q&A

I can't find the detailed licensing information for Altair Embed Basic.

The page https://solidthinking.com/product/embed/pricing/ says 'Recommended for academics, hobbyists and hackers' and the Professional edition says 'Recommended for commercial application'. The press release for the Basic edition says 'Introducing Basic Editions of its MBD suite of software products – Altair Compose™, Altair Activate™, and Altair Embed™ – available to everybody at no cost, with free training videos available online via Altair’s open Learning Center.  There are no license fees, nor any subscription or maintenance fees.' (my underlining emphasis)

 

I am an engineer at a company. Aside from the 'recommended' issue, can I use Altair Embed Basic at my job? Or does the licensing prohibit the Basic editions from any commercial use (e.g. design/verification work internal to a for-profit company, whether or not that work is used to help produce for-profit products or services)

Answers

  • Ric_22025
    Ric_22025
    Altair Employee
    edited January 2019

    Hi Jason S.,

    Yes, Altair Embed Basic can be used  for professional applications at your job. 

    Ric

     

     

  • Altair Forum User
    Altair Forum User
    Altair Employee
    edited March 2019

    Thanks! Is there anything in the product documentation or licensing information that clarifies this? (Or, if you are an Altair employee, could you refer me to staff contact information for someone who could confirm this so I can satisfy my company's license compliance group?)

  • Jim_Ryan
    Jim_Ryan
    Altair Employee
    edited April 2019

    Jason, all:

     

    We are delighted that you, as an engineer in industry, are interested in using our free Basic Edition of Embed – there likely is no easier (and low-risk) way for you to try it out to see if it will help you achieve your goals for Embedded System Development.  We certainly hope you can convince yourself that it will (or, at the very least, that you can find out early that it won’t do what you want, thus saving yourself from wasting a lot of time, effort, and potential cost to figure that out)!

     

    I am an Altair manager and can assure you that our no-cost Basic Editions are free for everyone and anyone – intentionally – to enable more engineers like you to leverage Math & System Simulation tools for Model-Based Development (whether in industry, academia, or just having fun on your own).  The recommendations for users & usage that you saw on our website, and referenced in your post here, are primarily intended to set proper expectations with potential users: As you have (hopefully) also seen in the Comparison Table of Capabilities on our website, our Basic Edition of Embed is, by design, a subset of the Professional Edition of Embed. 

     

    So there may be some industrial-strength modeling, simulation, and/or code-generation capabilities that you, as an engineer in industry, need which are not available in the Basic Edition of Embed.  As long as you are aware of that upfront, then we hope there will be no surprises, ensuring a positive & rewarding experience with our products for you and your company. 

     

    If you can achieve everything that you want & need to do with our no-cost Basic Edition of Embed, that is great!  In a complementary manner, if you ever need additional capabilities, our Professional Edition is available as a low-cost upgrade option, which is especially affordable if your company uses HyperWorks Units or solidThinking Units (in which case you can likely use our Professional Edition at no additional cost).

     

    Lastly, if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to also check out our free Basic Editions of other Altair Math & Systems tools for Model-Based Development (i.e., Altair Activate and Altair Compose).  For instance, Compose is based on the OpenMatrix Language (OML) whose syntax is compatible with MATLAB's.  So if you have .m files, you can open and run them in Compose.  And Activate can import and run Simulink diagrams.

     

    (Oh, one more thing: if you or your company's compliance group need to see the End-User License Agreement which everyone must 'Accept' in order to download our free Basic Editions, you can access that any time here: https://basicportal.altair.com/register)

     

    Best regards,

         Jim Ryan

    Global Strategy Director, Math & System Simulation tools

    Altair | Innovation Intelligence®