>> What have Eagle folk here done about this - just wondering... It annoys me >> slightly, but I guess the previous licensing model was not paying the bills >> and Autocad are promising great things...
It was probably paying the bills, but bean counters love what they call "sticky" models, where the customers have to pay and pay to use something. Autodesk strongly implies that the additional money will fuel rapid improvements, and they do seem to be rolling out nice new features frequently. > > I was gobsmacked when the licensing model for Eagle V8 was announced. I was > expecting/hoping for a model along the lines of the Fusion 360 3D package > i.e. free for hobbyists, education and small businesses (less than < $100k > turnover). > I'm annoyed, but not surprised. It would be nice if there were a hobbyist version, but I eventually outgrew the free version of Eagle and upgraded, ultimately to the pro version. I have a lot of time invested in it. > I did look around at other free or low cost offerings but like you I have a > huge time investment in Eagle and have many times many Eagle library > components draw up. > Fortunately, modern versions of Eagle use an XML format, which can be reasonably easily parsed and transcoded into other formats, so I'm expecting I'll be able to bring my libraries with me in some form. > My brother uses Design Spark so I did look at it carefully. > I had a brief look at Design Spark (Elektor likes it), but as it's DOS-only, it's a non-starter for me. Nick mentioned Altium, but it's expensive and also DOS-only (which rather negates their "user-friendly" claim). I also looked at a couple of the online-only offerings, but I really like having software I can run locally. My current front contender for a replacement is Kicad, which is free (always nice) and open source (which means that converters are likely available for existing Eagle designs, and if not, I can write them myself using the source code as a starting point and tool kit – if I end up doing so, I'll of course make any tools I develop freely available). I might start contributing to Kicad itself too – it's a dandy way to encourage the kinds of features I prefer. > But I have stuck with Eagle 7.7. I realise this is a dead-end product but I'm > still hopeful that Autocad will think again and change the model. > Alas, I'm not too hopeful. The Autodesk people seem like decent folks (they did keep Instructables free), but they can't help being old-school corporate (even the current Instructables has a bunch of nagging to "upgrade"). > I don't think there is anyway that Autocad can "turn off" Eagle 7.7?!? > Technically they might be able to, but I'm confident they won't try. The backlash from people who paid for it would be immense, in a well-connected community of current and potential paying customers. However, I don't expect them to continue to update it, and ultimately, it probably won't run on newer operating systems and computers. So people will have the choice of maintaining an older system to run it, or switching to another EDA suite (either the newer subscription form of Eagle, or some other package entirely). Obviously it behooves Autodesk to make the new Eagle as appealing as possible, in order to gain and keep subscribers. It may well become a very nice piece of software. I don't automatically discard the notion of subscription software, but it's a numbers game. For example, I use a subscription-based tool to run my vinyl cutter. I do so on an irregular basis, so I don't keep up the subscription, I just buy a month whenever I wish to use it. It's pretty cost effective that way, and I always get the latest version. Many people buy HBO Go the same way, whenever a show they like enough is airing. In this case, my light usage equates to small cost, so I'm fine with it. However, with Eagle and Photoshop, I'm in a different situation. I use both of them often enough that I'd have to buy a continuous subscription, but I don't make any money from either of them, so I deeply resent the significant cost for my lightweight hobbyist usage. In both cases, my plan is the same: use the paid-up versions for as long as I can, then switch to something else (Kicad in the case of Eagle, Gimp in the case of Photoshop). I'll be curious to see what the various maker companies do (I'm guessing AdaFruit will stick with Eagle, but SparkFun may well change horses). - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/A1A0C922-7544-49EF-A26F-9E42CDDD7691%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
