Academic Licence for SM 2018

[Mark Davies]

Do you have plans to offer SM2018 free to teachers and students? I've been using the Beta and now the free trial, but I'm not sure if you're going to offer the product free (or discounted) to academics.

- Mark

[vtpoet]

There's already a free version called Freeoffice: http://www.freeoffice.com/en/. The only difference, to my knowledge, is that Freeoffice doesn't offer tabbed windows (for more than one document) and doesn't come with a spell-checking dictionary---which could be dicey, I suppose, with students.

[Mark Davies]

I'm happy with SM2016, but I installed SM2018 for Linux for the Beta. It'd be a pain to revert to SM2016.

[vtpoet]

Depending what you mean, "reverting" to 2016 is as easy as uninstalling 2018. Did you uninstall 2016 when testing the Beta?

[Mark Davies]

It's not quite as easy as that, as keyboard shortcuts and templates don't transfer across seamlessly. Also I installed SM2018 onto a new machine, so I've never installed SM2016 on it.

[vtpoet]

Yeah, can't help with that. Unless they release a free version of SM2018, you're either going to have to pay for the new version or suffer through the pain of re-assigning templates and keyboard shortcuts.

To my knowledge, they've never released an academic or student version. I think their full fledged software suite costs less than the academic versions of either WordPerfect or Word. Word 365 is "free" if you're a student, but you lose your license once you graduate. WordPerfect, I think, offers a single license for around 90 dollars? SM2108 gives you a license for 5 PCs (my family uses it) and its good for as long as you want it. As you know, neither Word nor WP works natively on Linux. Softmaker works on Mac/Linux/Windows/Android.

I know, I sound like a shill...

And then there's always LibreOffice... okay for general use.

[Mark Davies]

I've been using SM since 2003. I've generally used the academic licence, as I was a student and now I'm a teacher. I'm sure originally the licence was discounted, now it's free. I'm happy to pay, but would prefer to get the academic price, and would be a bit annoyed if I bought it at full price only to have the academic one come out soon after.

[mcolligan]

I've been using SM since 2003. I've generally used the academic licence, as I was a student and now I'm a teacher. I'm sure originally the licence was discounted, now it's free. I'm happy to pay, but would prefer to get the academic price, and would be a bit annoyed if I bought it at full price only to have the academic one come out soon after.

Completely agree. Would be nice to hear something definitive from SoftMaker regarding academic license one way or another.

[sven-l]

There will be an academic license available in the future but there is no schedule yet. We will inform you as soon as the academic license is available.

[mcolligan]

There will be an academic license available in the future but there is no schedule yet. We will inform you as soon as the academic license is available.

Thank you for the update!