The ABAQUS licence agreement – the document in which the owner of the intellectual property tells us what we can and cannot do with a software package – for the ABAQUS finite-element analysis software is now several years old. It contains restrictions which mean that we cannot make full use of ABAQUS while the campus remains closed or for distance learning next academic year. We have been offered the opportunity to transition to the most up-to-date licence terms and we propose to do so in the very near future. The new terms will allow:

• ABAQUS to be used remotely on on-campus facilities from other locations within the UK, and;
• All students to install ABAQUS on personally-owned machines, again within the UK.

The software vendor currently does not permit remote access or student installs outside the UK, but is reconsidering this.

Apart from these extra permissions, there is little change between the two sets of terms, although there is now a firm definition of what constitutes permitted academic use: “use by authorized users solely for purposes that are strictly related to (i) education, institutional, instruction and/or (ii) experimental, theoretical and/or digital research work, undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundations of phenomena and observable facts, up to proof of concept in a laboratory.”

As before, commercial use remains prohibited without purchase of commercial licences.

A plain English summary of the new terms and the current terms is available for University staff and students (pdf download, log in may be required):

We will let you know when the new licence is in place; in the meantime, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

There has recently been several updates to research software including ABAQUS by the Research Applications Support Team. More information can be found on the software update blog post.