Activation

CAn some body help me in coping the AB PLC avtivation floppies in windows platform to anathor floppy

Use the search possibility of this site for activation or key copying and you'll find out nobody here is very willing to help in such matters. The risk of getting involved in something illegal is way too big.

You are entitled to make a backup of keys and activations, but it is impossible for us to determine if your question is ligitimate or if you're trying to break the law. So, because of that: sorry but although I know how, I'm not able to help you.

Regards,

best way to buy used activation floppy at low price

Until about 3-5 years ago the bigger vendors like Rockwell Software could depend on the majority of end-users to more or less "play by the rules", ie almost all corporate entities would purchase legitimate licences, and keep them in support. This income stream was of course vital to funding both their Support systems and new product development. Not one of us in the Western world is able to work for free and neither can the guys at RSI.

In the meantime the smaller guys all knew how to provide backup copies of RSI keys and as long as we were in the game helping Rockwell move hardware, mostly they were happy to turn a blind eye to the ease with which copying could be done. Everyone was more or less happy with this arrangement as long as one was discrete about it. If you supported your local distributor, you could generally count on someone supporting you if you needed it.

Over the last 3-5 years however it has become very apparent that Asia is not going to play by the rules. Software theft in that part of the world is completely rampant and out of control. Major facilities blatantly operate large numbers of unlicenced softwares and almost zero cost keys can be obtained on black markets with ease. As a result Rockwell Software is forced to change the method of software protection. Over the next two major CPR releases (ie the next 12 months) most of their current products will move to an entirely new protection system. It will be much harder to steal RSI products in future.

That's too bad, Phillip. Once again honest folks forced to suffer because of the sins of the few.

I wonder if A-B has considered not making RSLogix a profit center? They could follow a different marketing model, where the cost of programming software is amortized in the cost of the hardware, just like engineering and marketing expense. This obviously wouldn't work for the more expensive SCADA type products.

When all is said and done I really wonder if the cost of enforcement, distribution, protection development, and customer angst don't offset the difference in the revenue stream between the current model and "free" programming software.

Obviously not my decision to make!

I'll let you into a secret , Siemens themselves at the control division used to use a crack for their software - technicall whilst part of the same group , they do need licensed software , this was "unofficially" done by all of us .

What worries me more is the way customers assume that they have the right to decompile and modify my software for other jobs without refering to me - (well not anymore) they don't see that the software was written for the exclusive use of the end user , but if they want to use it for another machine , then there is a charge (maybe waivered in some cases , maybe a token gesture in others - maybe a re-engineer fee ). I have frequently come across my software and dedicated blocks reused for other nearly similar projects where there are only I/O changes - with the lesser S7 processor that use an MMC , and customers of dubious repute , a pdf listing is given , together with a MMC files .
Sorry about the rant , some people just have no loyalty !!

Hmmm.. even AB copy their own, I purchased 7 ADS client floating licences a year ago, when I installed them I ended up with 1, how you might ask... well it appears rockwell copied a single disk so all the same number activation so as I installed them on the server they overwrote the preveous one, well they did send me new disks & this time with different serial No's, as for copying I agree about vendors need to protect their investment but the cost of the software, hardware (how many of you have had to purchase the PCMCIA card for DH+ at £850 notes or £200 for MPI adapter it's a joke as there are other hardware thats almost as good, Mitsubishi have the right Idea, the simple gx developer is reasonably priced, not protected only by a number & the Q series now have USB connection or 232, a couple of quid for a usb printer lead & your up & running.
Well hands up to Mitsi, so far so good although a bit dissapointed in the cost of GX IEC, expensive & produces some raw code that works, but not exactly good practice, just uploaded a program done in IEC from an A2 into GX Developer, the code is in-correct but appears to work but will not compile in ladder, I have had to convert it based on what I know the logic should be.

Tom Jenkins said:

I wonder if A-B has considered not making RSLogix a profit center? They could follow a different marketing model, where the cost of programming software is amortized in the cost of the hardware, just like engineering and marketing expense. This obviously wouldn't work for the more expensive SCADA type products.

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About 10 years ago (when I was still employed by Rockwell) I was at a seminar covering the newly acquired ICOM software. One of the VP's of the newly formed RSI floated a proposal to add $10 to the price of MicroLogix and supply RSLogix500 (for MicroLogix only) free of charge. For reasons I never understood, all the sales & marketing people present shouted it down.

what gets me with ab these days is the Add on that i thought i had.. Now i was just a rookie when i got my rs 500 nd 5000..now i am getting more into it i just get mad..
I paid close to $5000 Canadian for rs 500 and 5000..Now i need to use FB..Oh tats an extra 1000$..O.K... swallow that..Now i am looking at SFC..thats another 1000 thank you very much..
Now i am looking at auto tune.(Don't know if its worth it..) and yep thats another 1000...

Now consider if they added $20.00 per controller they sell..I think they would recoup there cash pretty quick...oh well i rant..I understand it cost money to create the products..But go figure how many micro's do they sell in a day..and how many software packages do they sell..

As for the vendors being there own worst enemy..i purchased 6 or 7 Cutler hammer panelmates..I wanted the MB+ network transfer option (Its usually an extra charge for the option)..so they sent me one disk.. I loaded it on one and then called for the rest..I was told i was supposed to copy the disk before i loaded it so i could use it on all the screens..Go figure..

D

One of the VP's of the newly formed RSI floated a proposal to add $10 to the price of MicroLogix and supply RSLogix500 (for MicroLogix only) free of charge. For reasons I never understood, all the sales & marketing people present shouted it down.

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Fairly obviously Gerry if you make the product free for one version, it gets that much harder to charge for any other version. It's called protecting the value of your product. Software ain't free, no more than you work for free either.

PhilipW said:

Fairly obviously Gerry if you make the product free for one version, it gets that much harder to charge for any other version. It's called protecting the value of your product. Software ain't free, no more than you work for free either.

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And if you recover your costs on the hardware sales, you aren't giving it away, are you? And a small increment on the hardware price would very likely generate more revenue than direct software sales of the RSLogix series.
I'm sure it was a serious proposal and would have been propagated through the system had it been adopted.

I agree. I would be willing to bet that more hardware sales have been lost to AD dot com because of the software price than have been generated by the software.

I made a backup copy of my activation disks using Copystar and I am glad I did. I had a hard disk failure and lost all the info on the computer. But it was no problem (a pain thou) because I had backups of everything. I recommend making backups of ANY software you own.

The argument about giving away RSlogix for free and funding it from hardware goes back ages...it's been thrashed about in this forum a number of times... and there are merits to both approaches.

However it ONLY works when there is a hardware sale to leverage off and RSI did NOT want to be limited to just that model. A quick look at the RSI catalog shows that the majority of products are not hardware related. Sure much of their revenue comes from the Logix eidtors...but why would they want their business model and market growth to be tied to just logic/application editors for hardware? Wonderware, Citect, and Intellution all get 100% of their revenue from software sales. Try buying a DCS of any type without paying for a software licence.

Globally the big PLC vendors are Seimens, Schneider, Rockwell and Omron. Combined these first tier vendors probably have >80% of the total world market and none of them give away their logic editors (or any other major software) for free. The second and third tier vendors only do so because they pretty much have to, in order to compete.

I agree that software only vendors for the likes of intouch, IFIX etc. need to sell their products & in some way so do rockwell, siemens etc, but the cost could be a minimum with some of the cost involved in development paid for by the hardware, after all with intouch etc. you only need to buy the software from them, the hardware can be bought elsewhere.

As for the plc manufacturers, they have you over a barrel, as they are the only supplier (well usually) of the software for use on their plc's.

and why to they continue to use these awful types of protocols or hardware communication interfaces, it is very easy for them to build in more than one port, i.e. 232 or usb for configuration & another like 485 or MPI.

Mitsubishi have done it to some extent.
And of course I'm sure some of you out there have come across the S5 for windows (done by another company) that was more uptodate, more features & cost less at the time of the old S5 for dos which incidently was still in CPM format with an emulator that allowed it to run in DOS, well if that wasn't a ripoff I don't know what is.