I was just wondering as I can imagine that in larger organizations a manager often only likes to open a file to check it out and doesn’t necessarily needs to model or edit stuff.
2 Likes
Hi @Gerard,
What you are asking for has been on the list for a while.
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-12264
– Dale
1 Like
Thanks Dale,
At least I don’t asking something that is obvious 
Bumping this issue
@brian, @dale, @aj1 - anything we can do to push the release target to a 6.0 update?
I run a single license between myself (las vegas) and a remote colleague (georgia)
- we badly need view-only access for our design review conferences
View-only access can also be helpful when one team member leaves rhino running while AFK (although ideally we’d fix WWW-740).
Realistically, could I become a mcneel dev intern/volunteer, for the purpose of fixing these and other issues that come up for my team? What are the channels there?
1 Like
Hi Max,
Making this change to our licensing system for Rhino 6 is too complex and too risky.
It sounds like, realistically, you just don’t have enough licenses to use Rhino effectively in your team. If one of you only requires read-only access all the time, install a single-computer expired evaluation on that machine, and you can use it for design reviews.
Hi Brian,
First I’d like to say that my partner and I love rhino, and we’re proud to support mcneel. We’re a startup, with rhino duty cycle lower than 50%. Apart from timesharing the license, our need is for a 3dm viewer, limited to two weekly thirty minute design reviews.
To resolve the current issue, we’ve decided to do review sessions over Team Viewer. We did consider sandboxing an elapsed evaluation environment, and even went so far as to verify that the license allows it. But we felt that would be too dishonest.
I appreciate that even the slightest error in deploying a licensing change to 6 would be nightmarish. It’s far simpler to roll out the change in version 7. Moreover, 7 represents a major rethink of the code; therefore backporting a viewer feature would be expensive and error prone. I won’t discount the complexity and resources involved in that type of testing and deployment.
However, there is still perhaps two years left in Rhino 6’s primetime lifecycle, and that leaves plenty to be gained from hotfixes and improvements, arguably even more complex ones. Far from taking away from the impact of the licensing changes due in Rhino 7, it’d inform their design and build anticipation for what’s to come. And it would make customers feel provided for; a free 3dm viewer would be a fantastic win for rhino users, their clients, and mcneel.
To conclude, although the technical risk and complexity is considerable, I hope mcneel will make a 3dm viewer possible in the nearer term. Whether as an extended license term or as an independent product, I think it would be a worthy investment.