How often can one revoke & activate a pro license?

Hi

I work with Unity both professionally and as a hobby, so I use both a subscription based pro license and a personal license.
As I understand it, you can´t have both on one machine simultaneously, so I revoke and activate the different licenses every now and again to change between them.

Is this "OK"? Is there a limit on the amount of times one can reactivate the pro license?

 

I don't have an answer for you, but I just wanted to say that that's a use case that I had never considered, but it seems so obvious in retrospect. I wonder how many other devs are in your situation, and how they handle that without tearing their hair out.

 

the main difference these days between pro, and free is the licensing and payment terms as well as extra services. I would just leave it on Pro for your day to day work and then when you try and do release builds make sure you are on the appropriate version of unity for that project.

 

I believe this is incorrect. Unity plays nice with different versions on the same system, I think I have about five installs on mine. So there is no real reason why you should be able to maintain multiple installs with different lisences.

Lisences are tied to you user ID, so switching lisences should be as simple as logging out and logging back in.

Edit: I actually tested this on a device. It doesn't work. This whole post is essentially incorrect.

 

Actually...

https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-service/software

 

He is not combining content created in different licenses. He has professional and personal projects, and they are strictly kept separate.

In addition, BoredMormon is suggesting installing Unity 5.1 (for example) twice, once with each key, so that they are both there and there's no license switching needed. It works with different versions of Unity, so it'll probably work with the same version twice.

 

Would two installed copies try to store downloaded assets in the same location? Seems like those could easily get mingled together by accident. Of course, it sounds like they are already mingled anyway.

 

Multiple computers. Which, honestly, is ridiculous. This stuff only bothers people who try to do the right thing.

I think asset downloads are per operating system user account.

As far as I know, separate installs still refer to the same license file. When I asked support about this I was told to revoke and re-activate as needed. The thing is, I can't revoke or re-activate a license that's being managed by an employer...

 

You could try using multiple accounts on your computer.

 

DOH! Sometimes we do forget that computers support multiple users. A separate user account for each version of Unity sounds like exactly the right solution. Data that needs to be shared between the accounts can be in a shared folder.

 

still a pretty painful and S***ty solution

 

Really? It's what I would actually prefer. Keep business and personal work completely separated so that there's no question of the accidentally getting intermingled.

 

Does anyone know if licenses are per local user account? That would be handy.

 

Since the license file is located in the folder C:\ProgramData\Unity i would think that all user have Access to it.

 

Your license file for one will cancel out the other, so the only way to have both Pro and Personal on the same machine is indeed to return the activation and delete the ULF file every time you need to switch...

The other way (which may or may not work) is to rename the ULF files so that they don't overwrite each other.

 

Wow. Storing the license file as a system wide setting seems like a really counter intuitive design. I haven't seen that kind of thing since the Windows 98 days.

 

i wounder if it cares, about you messing with that file, could write a little script, for renaming the file to swap liscense

 

As Unity matures, more and more developers are going to have multiple clients, employers, or hobbies. It sounds like you should really considering a license switching system, or at least storing it per-user instead of globally.

 

That's excellent, Cecilie!

 

Ooh! command line options.

-force-free Make the editor run as if there is a free Unity license on the machine, even if a Unity Pro license is installed.

That looks like it's exactly what the OP needs. Set up a shortcut to launch Unity with that option and it runs under the Personal license even though the Pro license is still installed.

 

I wonder how long that has been there and, if it's been a while, why the support person didn't tell me about it.

Thanks @ErisCaffee!

 

i get the feeling it is from at least before they brought all the pro features into the free version of unity. It was likly meant to allow asset store authors to test on both pro and free

 

Absolutely. Still, the support staff aren't working in a bubble, right?

That said, I'm a fan too. In the long time I've been working with Unity I think I've had a grand total of 2 less-than-ideal responses from support, which is pretty good!

 

Thanks for the great info, cecilie!
I'm not switching that often so just knowing that I can return and reactivate a license more than a few times works for me

 

I know its pretty old thread But i wanted to know is there any new restrictions set??
There is a usecase. We have CI setup
Build machine 1 - Which is low end and takes longer wait times to get the build
Build Machine 2 - Which we use it for faster rollouts but machine would be busy all the time because of some other jobs
So is it fine if i return the license from B1/B2 at the end of every successful build? and using batch command , login with serial for every new build.?? we would be taking builds for every couple of hours
Any restrictions been made on this returning and activating of licenses??
thanks in advance