OT: Eagle is now subscription-based

[Nick]

As all Eagle users will know, Eagle was acquired from Premier Farnell at the start of the year and Eagle 8, the new version, has a completely different licensing model - it's now subscription based, starting at USD 15/pcm for the "standard" version and going up to USD 65/pcm for the "professional" ones.

I'm a long-time Eagle user, probably for more than 15 years, so have a lot invested in it in terms of libraries and existing designs.

However, I can stake USD 100/pa (the annual up-front cost of the USD 15/pcm option). but you need to be connected to the internet every couple of weeks for your Eagle license to stay active. If it expires, I'm told that you can still generate Gerbers from your old designs and even export in the old V7 format using the free version - our old licenses and software will keep working.

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...

Thoughts?

Nick

[Grahame]

Nick, All,

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 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. My brother uses Design Spark so I did look at it carefully. 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.

I don't think there is anyway that Autocad can "turn off" Eagle 7.7?!?

Grahame

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[Nick]

I am seriously considering Altium CircuitStudio.

It's expensive up front ($995), and the $150/pa, but it's a fully professional package from an extremely reputable source and imports all your Eagle files (incl. libraries).

It also has access to all of the many 100s of 1000s of components in Altium's libraries. No practical limitations at all, though it's not Altium  Designer (but it's a fraction of the cost).

Nick

[John Rehwinkel]

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

[newxito]

I moved to easyeda because the maker license is no longer available :-(

[Mitch]

I bought a book on Eagle to learn, but I switched to DipTrace when I realized how much Eagle would cost to make boards that would hold 8, Z568 tubes. Initial cost and upgrades are very reasonable. 

[John Rehwinkel]

> I bought a book on Eagle to learn,

I bought an Eagle book too, but didn't find it very helpful and ended up learning more from online tutorials.

> but I switched to DipTrace

That's another one I plan to investigate.

> when I realized how much Eagle would cost to make boards that would hold 8, Z568 tubes.

Back when I was using the Hobbyist version of Eagle, I had a similar problem with a board for 8 IN-8-2 tubes, and another project with a microcontroller controlling a bunch of triacs. In both cases, I ended up dividing the boards up. Then IN-8-2 project, I split it into two boards of 4 tubes apiece with right-angle connectors between them and a vertical one using the same pads to bring the signals in. This way, the two boards were identical, and with some PCB houses, that's a cheaper way to go (for example, OSHPark offers 3 copies of a board for a price based on the board's size). The triac project ended up working the same way, I had a CPU board and then a bunch of 8-channel triac boards connected with ribbon cables. This actually ended up making the solution fairly versatile, as some computer controlled lighting software supports 16 channels (so I'd use 2 8-channel boards), but some could utilize all 24 channels available (so I'd plug in 3 boards).

Even though I now have the full professional version of Eagle, I've found that the decision I once made of necessity I now still often make by choice.

- John

[Nick]

I still believe that the right technical decision is to go to CircuitMaker, but lack of bandwidth to manage the transition means I just paid the money to Autodesk for 1 year's Standard license - I used to be on Premium with 7.7.

I tried to buy the license out here in the UAE to avoid the scourge of VAT, but it's not sold in this region. Can't buy off the USA site as you need a US address to do that... so bit the bullet and bought off the UK site - GBP 114 incl. VAT for a year - annoying as it's only USD 100 in the US...

I'll see how much value AD add to the product over the next year before thinking about a move again...

Nick

[SWISSNIXIE - Jonathan F.]

Alot of companies use this licence model, like Microsoft Office.. and mostly the limits are very very badly choosen...

Eagle had the hobbyist version along time before, but the space is very limited. I'm still using Eagle 6, which still does all the things i need (i have a student version from my ex school, unlimited size.)

It would be better when they would limit the amount of schematics instead of size - or charge you by size.


Our company uses a product based on a credit system - for example you buy 5000 Credits, and your usage costs credits. This is actually the ONLY really fair charge for a product. Like for eagle every design you start would cost a amount of credits, if you go over a specific size, you would be charged a aditional design.

[Tomasz Kowalczyk]

I think a good alternative with a license which won't cause any trouble is KiCad. 

I've used it for some time and it is far from great (comparing to Altium Designer I use at work), but it certainly does the job, is not very awkward to use and most importantly - as open source software the license permits using it for free even in commercial use.

I don't know how transition from Eagle looks like, judging by Google results there are some possiblities, but they are limited.

The whole idea behind KiCad is to make PCB design software for hobbyists and small scale companies, which won't drain their pockets.

I haven't tested the gerber export, though. So far, all designs made in KiCad by me were exported only as PDF for thermal transfer PCB making.

[Robert L]

One more happy KiCAD user... more than ample for my hobby scale projects of no more than a few sheets. Learning curve was not steep and have been happy with both schematic capture and layout.

Using heavier weight commercial tools at work... prefer KiCAD for most everything I'm doing. Especially like the licensing terms with KiCAD.

B

[Robert L]

An example of support for the KiCAD community:

https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/02/kicad-software-gets-cern-treatment

[Joe Croft]

I myself like PCB from the GEDA collection. I uae gschem as well. I like doing my own placement and quite often create much of the pc board before the schematic, but that is just how I roll ;)

-joe

On Aug 18, 2017 11:29, "Robert L" <boble...@gmail.com> wrote:

An example of support for the KiCAD community:

https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/02/kicad-software-gets-cern-treatment

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[gregebert]

Hooray! Another gEDA enthusiast.

I've done several boards with gschem + pcb,; no problems. At this point I dont see any need to switch.

[SWISSNIXIE - Jonathan F.]

Sorry for digging this up, but i found this:

https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/free-download

Seems like there is a free version for "makers"

It has 2 schematic pages (which is idiotic, since the size of a "page" is infinte???)
Two signal layers
And 80cm2 of board space.

For small projects this would be finde. The only thing you can't make is large tube boards for like Z568M tubes.

But i wonder how good their "limit" is coded, i'll download the version, make a board in eagle 5 (large size) and then open with new version.

[Nick]

The 80cm^2 version is pretty much the same as the old CadSoft one - half a Eurocard (160mm x 100mm).

You should be able to open any legit SCH/BRD file in the free version, just not edit it if it's too big.

Nick

[Dave]

That seems the same as before.

this may be just a rebranding effort.

Also, if you don't know, if you have access to an email address that ends in .edu, you can get a free license for the unrestricted 'lite' version.

The key advantage of this version is that you can have a board up to 10x10cm which matches the size of cheap boards from many board houses these days.

i.e. SeeedStudios sells 10 PCBs of 10x10cm for $5 (as do others)

And yes, you can open bigger boards, but you can only change the 10x10 area around the boards origin.

On Sunday, August 13, 2017 at 9:21:24 AM UTC-4, Nick wrote:

[Dave]

Wow... guess I need to dig into the impact of this and NOT update my current EAGLE version!

On Sunday, August 13, 2017 at 9:21:24 AM UTC-4, Nick wrote:

[Dan Hollis]

The reason people are angry is that immediately after the acquisition they
repeatedly assured everyone they wouldn't change the licensing model and
that nothing about eagle would change, that everything would remain
exactly the same.

Then a few months later they did exactly that. And didn't apologize for
lying.

-Dan

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