I bought a copy of smart unfold several months ago. The software has some advantages overall compared to rhino’s handling of flattening shapes but its cost was astronomical. Nowadays I needed to migrate to a new PC and I wanted to deactivate it on my old and move to my new pc the vendor tells it cannot be done. The license is bound to my machine or computer. I was outraged. It was terribly unfair and I suspect not entirely illegal as the users have some contractual rights. He pointed me to a sheet in the website I hadn’t read when I purchased which says exactly that but has so far refused to provide me with my license, I mean the legal text.
I’m not sure if there is anything we can do to help but I’ll ask our sales folks if they have a contact to recommend. I agree it’s not a great policy on their part but I do see several references to the machine specific license on their FAQ page. There doesn’t appear to be any info about returns or refunds either unfortunately.
"What is a perpetual license?
It is the product license bound to your machine. Whether you reformat your hard disk, reinstall the operating system or install a different operating system, the license will still be valid for the computer. There is no time limitation. However, you can’t move this license to any other computer. "
Yuk. It brings a whole new meaning to the word ‘perpetual’.
-Pascal
my renderer license (indigo) works that way… it’s bound to a single computer… however, they’ll let you transfer it to a new computer via a quickish process… (just a matter of waiting for them to respond to an email which is less than a half-day)
tbh, i don’t care what the smartunfold license says… i’d be pretty mad to find myself in that type of situation… they need to change their terms… that’s all there is to it.
not sure how to make them change but i guess in my case, it would go something like— a handful of email exchanges and if they havent authorized my new computer by then, i’d call them up and cuss them out and never use their product again…
maybe you’ll be more effective 
Plus posting on any available forum about their shitty policy.
Actually that depends on where you live and whether the company has a dependency within the EU. The European Court ruled Microsoft’s resale policy of “used” licenses invalid (C-128/11, 2009/24/EG - Art. 4 Abs. 2 + Art. 5 Abs. 1). Meaning, MS cannot refuse to transfer licenses, you resell after buying and using them.
So in the EU, you could still have licenses bound to hardware but the manufacturer could not refuse to transfer that license to any other hardware. Don’t know if there are relevant rulings in the US.
^^^This. IMO any software company that has a policy that causes real harm to their [well] paying users has forfeited any privilege not to be publicly shamed.
Disclaimer: I’m certainly not advocating any type of illegal activity…
On a slightly more useful note, you could probably pay someone less than their license cost to decompile the license manager they use, figure out what hardware ID/keygen it uses and make yourself a shiny new license. Like, find a local h@xX0r and buy him a keg for his trouble…
You have a node license which is fair to the user and developer. Such a license may be bound to your computer but it can be deactivated and reactivated on another computer.
If you know to which type of hardware the license is bound, there might be a semi legal way to transfer this piece of hardware to a new computer. Either physically or in software. Some of the professional server mainboards for example allow to assign a network card hardware id manually…even cpu ids can be changed using software.
c.
In that point, the FAQ is kind of contradictory.
The Pro version is allowed to run on virtual machines, which basically renders hardware ID useless. So they allow you to run the software on an emulation of any hardware and HW ID you choose, but refuse to reissue a license if you physically change the hardware used for identification… 