Welcome to vendor lock-in, it's mostly done by for formats and other ways. It's the most annoying plague in software and it happens very aggressively in EDA
Hehe, yes.
Some of the less subtle lock-ins include closed binary-only formats, and timed-license files. Thankfully, those mostly are behind us, as the market place these days is too well connected to fall for those tricks.
Hardware keys that incurred a charge of hundreds of dollars to migrate, was another favourite.
More subtle, is deliberate crippling of lower-end tools, to force users to upgrade.
This also is getting harder, as tools like KiCad effectively now set the bar of what is tolerated at the base level.
Some of the 'tricks' a quick trawl of forums finds are
* Removal of slots to force Round holes only (Altium, CS) -amazing, yes they still try this, even though even KiCad supports slots just fine.
* Removal of scripts from lowest end tools (Altium, Mentor) even though Eagle and KiCad have advanced scripting.
The good news is, the libraries
are getting more open, as Distributors start to offer Component Libraries, and each new update sees the EDA corporates forced to improve the specs of even their base line tools.
Ironically, this is rather easier for them, than to improve specs of their high end tools, as the low-end cripple is often a deliberately added conditional