Imagine you have a deadline...

[GlowingGhoul]

When I first used EAGLE, I was surprised how cumbersome and awkward it was to use. It's nice to see Autodesk bought it so they can finally drive the last nail into its coffin. 

When you find a CAD program that's elegant and intuitive from the very first use, let me know. 

One thing you could say about EAGLE is that it was a rock-solid implementation that rarely crashed.  Looks like Autodesk has added enough artificial points of failure to remedy that particular condition.

Anger, one of the stages of grieving.

[Karel]

I guess most (ex) Eagle users are in grief since the autodesk debacle...

[XFDDesign]

The only problem I ever had with Eagle, was that sometimes I would go to pick a part, select it, and then either double-click it or say okay, and it would 'forget' my choice. I would repeat the process a second time and then it would work. It did that some what frequently.

[beenosam]

When I first used EAGLE, I was surprised how cumbersome and awkward it was to use. It's nice to see Autodesk bought it so they can finally drive the last nail into its coffin. 

When you find a CAD program that's elegant and intuitive from the very first use, let me know. 

One thing you could say about EAGLE is that it was a rock-solid implementation that rarely crashed.  Looks like Autodesk has added enough artificial points of failure to remedy that particular condition.

I used Eagle for about a month before getting frustrated. Even read some of a book on how to use it. After that, I downloaded the trial for Altium...after a couple days I was significantly more functional in Altium because it works more like a normal piece of software. Not 100% but certainly more than Eagle.

[sleemanj]

When you find a CAD program that's elegant and intuitive from the very first use, let me know. 

Here you go.

[Elf]

When you find a CAD program that's elegant and intuitive from the very first use, let me know.

Here you go.

As someone that was going to purchase Eagle (pre-Autodesk) and ended up with DipTrace, I have to say, I think it all turned out for the best!

I barely read two pages of the tutorial PDF and have already made a few full schematics, boards, components, and patterns without issue. And, after sending off the Gerbers to OSH Park it all turned out exactly as I expected. Their licensing levels are pretty generous as well. I am much happier with the pin limitations than the arbitrary board size limitations.

[Karel]

 

[XFDDesign]

Come now, AD Corporate thinks that is totally worth $500/yr! Look at all the effective use of white (black?) space!

[FrankBuss]

There is no profit for them to fix the Linux version. All Eagle Linux users already switched to KiCAD

[Karel]

There is no profit for them to fix the Linux version. All Eagle Linux users already switched to KiCAD

Nope. We are still using V7.7. Do you really think we can just move our company to use Kicad??

We will never use V8 and for the time being, V7 can do everything we want it to do,
so for the moment there's no acute problem.
Problems will arise if and when we want to hire another engineer, because licenses for V7 are no longer be sold.
In that case we probably have to move to Altium or Orcad using Virtualbox... :-(

My last hope is that next year autodesk will sell Eagle to another company that will start to offer perpetual licenses.
But we will do no business with autodesk, not after the way they treated us.
They have no respect for customers.

[james_s]

It may not be trivial, but it can be done. I've seen companies move from one software product to another multiple times with varying degrees of difficulty but they all managed to pull it off. For something like an EDA I would probably start new products in the new software and keep the old software around in some capacity to support existing products. If there are complex designs that need continuing updates and changes then maybe it makes sense to come up with an automated or semi-automated way of converting the files. Effort spent on a transition now is effort saved down the road when you are locked into proprietary rental software with an active interest in making it difficult for you to transition.

[jgarc063]

Hi Karel,

I understand that you are upset, you have made that very clear. However, I disagree that Autodesk has mistreated you in anyway. Technically, you haven't lost anything. You still have the V7.7 license you originally paid for and no one will be taking that away from you. The subscription change only applies to Autodesk EAGLE, so you still have exactly what you paid for.

Autodesk does care about it's customers to do othewise just doesn't make business sense. The improvements in EAGLE are a testament to that, the fact that I'm here replying is also testament to that. EAGLE feature wise is far more powerful than it's ever been and all this has happened in less than a year. I know you've been copying issues from the Autodesk forum and posting them here, however you haven't been following up on the resolution of those issues. When Autodesk EAGLE first released it's stability wasn't what users were used to with V7 and prior. On the flip side, there wasn't as much change in EAGLE's codebase prior to Autodesk either so stability was easier to preserve. With that said many of the linux issues have or are being ironed out and every release is better than the last in terms of stability(I run a Linux Mint 18 box with MATE 1.14.2 desktop here). I think there is large Linux market that is a unique opportunity for us to capitalize on, since no other commercial tool natively supports linux(keyword: commercial, KiCAD and GEDA are not commercial entities).

Never say from these waters I will not drink. I haven't heard anyone say they have actually tried the latest 8.1.1 here. You may discover that it's not what you thought it was. EAGLE's file format is XML so you are never truly locked in as can be seen by all of the converters available in other tools. You really have nothing to lose by trying it and then forming an informed opinion.

Just my 2 cents, if they are even worth that much. If you try it and run into any problems I'm here to help.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia

[macegr]

Jorge, I am glad to hear that Eagle V7.7 (which I also paid for) is still a current and valid product and that you are recommending it for customer use. As Matt has stated before, Autodesk EAGLE (Eagle 8.x) is a different product, not an upgrade from the Eagle V7.7 line. When can I expect the support patch to Eagle V7.7 that fixes the Mac OS bug where the program will sometimes repeatedly crash while zooming unless each window is resized slightly upon startup?

[macegr]

Regarding "why not just try Eagle 8" there are two reasons:

• It appears to be 99.9% similar to Eagle 7, plus an internet-tied login wall. No compelling reason or tasty new features, I am already familiar with Eagle and there is nothing new to try.
• The Autodesk license still says I will lose access to my Eagle 7 license if I upgrade to Eagle 8, in much the same way that I no longer have an Eagle 5 license after upgrading to Eagle 7.
   I realize you have said differently on the forums, but the legal document still says otherwise.

[MarkL]

...
Never say from these waters I will not drink. I haven't heard anyone say they have actually tried the latest 8.1.1 here. You may discover that it's not what you thought it was. EAGLE's file format is XML so you are never truly locked in as can be seen by all of the converters available in other tools. You really have nothing to lose by trying it and then forming an informed opinion.
...

Suppose you had a v7.7 user that signed up for autodesk eagle for a year (or whatever) and proceeded in earnest to give v8.1.1 a chance.

They work with it for a year and decide it's not worth the licensing hassle, or cost for added features, or perhaps some forced upgrade along the way introduces instability with their platform or graphics card.  Whatever the reason, they don't want to use the new version anymore.

Over the course of the year they have been saving their work in the native XML format.  It's unavoidable that the format of the XML files will be continuously enhanced by autodesk to support saving of files that were produced using the new features.

What guarantees can autodesk make that a user can drop back to 7.7 and not lose a year of work because the XML files are no longer backwards compatible?  Sure the new features won't work, but what survives in a .BRD/.SCH file in a downgrade from 8.1.1 to 7.7?  And I mean specifically.

I'm interested in the new modularity feature, but not at the cost of a lock in.  I'm not seeing your "nothing to lose" scenario.  Please explain how it could work with no risk.

[macegr]

Regarding "Never say from these waters I will not drink" Autodesk should sell Eagle to someone who'll sell real licenses, and use the money to help out Flint Michigan's poisoned water problem. Their water department has about a $25 million deficit, which sounds about right. Great PR all around.

[KE5FX]

. I think there is large Linux market that is a unique opportunity for us to capitalize on, since no other commercial tool natively supports linux(keyword: commercial, KiCAD and GEDA are not commercial entities).

If you can sell EAGLE 8 subscriptions to Linux users, your talents are being grievously underutilized at Autodesk.  You're ready for your own 24-hour cable channel.

[westfw]

Do you really think we can just move our company to use Kicad??

Yep; this is the flip side:
Imagine that you have a deadline, and some ivory tower bureaucrat in your company has decided that you need to switch CAD programs between the EAGLE 8.0 (which you're not using yet anyway) license is "unacceptable."  And now you have to learn a new cad program and figure out how to convert your existing designs (which you are "re-using" for your current project) to that new CAD program in addition to doing the new design itself...

[moz]

And better security from hacking of their products.

This. In some ways I do actually prefer it, because I remember dongles. That only worked if you had the right sort of parallel port, with the right OS drivers, and sometimes only if the wind was right. Until they broke. Then you just had to return the broken dongle and wait for a new one to be sent out. At least with the cloud you usually only have to wait until the internet comes back up, or the provider unborks their server. Rather than until the guy who authorises dongles gets back from holidays (I kid you not).

The stupidest dongle I ever worked with authorised the driver for a ridiculously expensive sheet fed scanner that came with its own interface card. Allegedly SCSI, but scanner was significantly slower with other SCSI cards. With card, 120ppm full duplex A5, or 60ppm A4. We scanned a lot of A5. But when the dongle malfunctioned the thing stopped working until the machine was power cycles. Windows NT with a big RAID array took a long time to power cycle. I was using conductive grease on the parallel port and screwing that thing in hard because that lowered the error rate to about once a day. Happiest day on that job was when someone found a competing scanner without a dongle. Called the company and we had a rep on site within a day with a demo unit. For a $50,000+ scanner you get quite prompt sales calls

[moz]

\
using the same provider for your production and DR does not remove common mode failure ... Never forget that the internet does not have an SLA.

You can have a lot of fun trying to provide robust, resilient cloud hosted services. Not to mention that in most cases you're dealing with users who don't have robust, resilient internet connections. Try explaining to  users that if the power and internet are down their mobile app might still work, but it's not going to be able to connect to the device on the site that has no power or internet. In our case we sell an add-on for the POE device that lets them plug two SIM cards in (we also sell cheap data-only plans from two different physical networks). Plus our devices have a battery in them. So at least in theory when things go wrong they have to go wrong with multiple locations of two cloud providers (our end), or alternatively two or three different ways to connect to the internet (their end). But that all costs money, and even more money if you want to test them regularly. OTOH, I expect AutoCAD to have that money and to spend it. There's no reason for them not to have servers on all three major cloud platforms and either automatically or manually switch to whichever is available. The customer should not have to deal with it. Especially when it's "authorise at startup", you should be able to fall back to using your phone as a hotspot for a few minutes if you have to.

[james_s]

Dongles never worked anyway, with anything remotely mainstream the software was always cracked. Didn't matter because as has been gone over many times, companies using this stuff buy their software, the dongle is just a useless security theater item that makes certain types of people feel better. The rental software can't be hacked, sure, but that doesn't even matter. When it's a product that is not in a class of its own, the rental model will result in far more lost customers than piracy ever did.

[ReneK]

EAGLE feature wise is far more powerful than it's ever been and all this has happened in less than a year.

IIRC, you released V7 back in 2014. So, are you saying that CadSoft fell asleep with the advent of V7 and did absolutely nothing for a next major release? Everything new is Autodesk? Not so easy to believe for me.

[jgarc063]

...
Never say from these waters I will not drink. I haven't heard anyone say they have actually tried the latest 8.1.1 here. You may discover that it's not what you thought it was. EAGLE's file format is XML so you are never truly locked in as can be seen by all of the converters available in other tools. You really have nothing to lose by trying it and then forming an informed opinion.
...

Suppose you had a v7.7 user that signed up for autodesk eagle for a year (or whatever) and proceeded in earnest to give v8.1.1 a chance.

They work with it for a year and decide it's not worth the licensing hassle, or cost for added features, or perhaps some forced upgrade along the way introduces instability with their platform or graphics card.  Whatever the reason, they don't want to use the new version anymore.

Over the course of the year they have been saving their work in the native XML format.  It's unavoidable that the format of the XML files will be continuously enhanced by autodesk to support saving of files that were produced using the new features.

What guarantees can autodesk make that a user can drop back to 7.7 and not lose a year of work because the XML files are no longer backwards compatible?  Sure the new features won't work, but what survives in a .BRD/.SCH file in a downgrade from 8.1.1 to 7.7?  And I mean specifically.

I'm interested in the new modularity feature, but not at the cost of a lock in.  I'm not seeing your "nothing to lose" scenario.  Please explain how it could work with no risk.

Hi MarkL,

Thanks for bringing this up. There will be an official response to this in the near term so I don't want to disclose anything yet. However, I can say that the scenario you are explicitly describing will be addressed and in a manner I feel you and most of our legacy users will find acceptable. I know how you guys feel about this whole situation right now, I've been reading all of the posts and answering some of them. I feel confident that the official response will be something you will like, especially in light of the last few months.The response I'm referring will not be a statement from one of our staff, but something you will see in hard substance in EAGLE itself. Just hang tight for a little bit longer.

Separate from that forthcoming response, my comment about the lockin referred to the fact that because our format is a documented XML format many tools (you guys know who they are) have already implemented EAGLE importers and even if we did add new items to the XML structure, it's likely that those tools would keep their importers current, it's too easy not to. So should a user decide they want to move to another tool, their data could be transferred into whatever new tool they wanted to use. Obviously you would still have to deal with a new learning curve so that's not ideal, but at the very least you would still have your IP.

Like I said, keep an eye out for an official response to your scenario. In fact once it's out, I'll come here and announce it so you guys can check it out.
@macegr I pretty sure this official response will answer some of your concerns as well.

I want to say a lot more; but for now, we just have to wait.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia

[jgarc063]

Regarding "why not just try Eagle 8" there are two reasons:

• It appears to be 99.9% similar to Eagle 7, plus an internet-tied login wall. No compelling reason or tasty new features, I am already familiar with Eagle and there is nothing new to try.
• The Autodesk license still says I will lose access to my Eagle 7 license if I upgrade to Eagle 8, in much the same way that I no longer have an Eagle 5 license after upgrading to Eagle 7.
   I realize you have said differently on the forums, but the legal document still says otherwise.

Hi macegr,

I'm happy to see you are still here. Your first point lets me know you still haven't played with it. There's been a lot of changes and I have had a hard time keeping up with some of them(and I support the tool for a living). I've seen your work so I know you are a strong EAGLE user, but I think even you would be surprised by all of usage improvements and details that have been cleaned up or improved, not to mention the major features that have come in.

In regards to your second point, we've already discussed it at length however there is one small piece of information you have wrong. Your V7 license DOES allow you to use V5 in fact it allows you to use all version prior to V7. You can try it out for yourself, open up V5 and apply your V7 key file and installation code, let me know if you need them to be resent. You didn't lose 5 when you bought V7. You won't lose V7 by trying Autodesk EAGLE either, however like I mentioned in my reply to MarkL I think this concern will be laid to rest shortly.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia

[jgarc063]

EAGLE feature wise is far more powerful than it's ever been and all this has happened in less than a year.

IIRC, you released V7 back in 2014. So, are you saying that CadSoft fell asleep with the advent of V7 and did absolutely nothing for a next major release? Everything new is Autodesk? Not so easy to believe for me.

Hi ReneK,

I hope you're having a good day today. I would never want to imply that our devs did nothing during the V7 release cycle. My point was to say that if you were to look at the UPDATE_en.txt (UPDATE_de.txt if you speak german) and compared what was released in the V7 series of EAGLE to what was released in the last few months of Autodesk EAGLE you would notice a big difference in the breadth and depth of development. This is mostly do to the increased manpower we now have at Autodesk.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia