Hobbyist Versions of Pro Tools

[Sal Ammoniac]

Why don't more professional tools vendors (Keil and IAR: are you listening?) offer less expensive licenses for noncommercial use, such as for hobbyists? Sure, they often offer crippled free versions with 32KB code/data limits, but sometimes that's not enough.

Rowley is a shining example of a company that does offer a noncommercial "personal" license for their CrossWorks IDE. The professional version is $1500 and the personal edition is $150. The two versions are exactly the same--the personal license gets you the full version without limits, but without any tech support and the prohibition against using it for commercial work.

Why don't the other companies do this? Why doesn't Keil, for example, offer a personal, noncommercial license for µVision without the 32KB limit? I'd gladly pay $200-300 for something like that, but $4000 for the full license is just not justifiable for hobby work.

[CM800]

I've come to like VisualGDB, they even do a 50% discount for education.

Works quite well!

[james_s]

That has often bothered me. Generally speaking if I have to pay for the tool that lets me develop for the hardware, I'll pass and go with different hardware that has free tools available.

[DimitriP]

and the prohibition against using it for commercial work

I'm not gonna say it

[legacy]

and why don't you change your hobby, instead ?

[mubes]

Segger do this with JLink edu. Yup, I'm the Segger apologist _again_.

[james_s]

What a lot of companies don't seem to realize is that many (most?) engineers have engineering related hobbies as well. If I'm already familiar with a product line in my hobby, I'm much more likely to select it for a paid job too.

[Jeroen3]

Most engineers don't get to choose unless they're starting the company.
Eda companies don't want those engineers using hobby versions for their startup.

[Sal Ammoniac]

What a lot of companies don't seem to realize is that many (most?) engineers have engineering related hobbies as well. If I'm already familiar with a product line in my hobby, I'm much more likely to select it for a paid job too.

Exactly! Companies like Keil should realize that they're not going to cannibalize their commercial business by selling hobbyist licenses, but they will generate a lot of good will that will translate into increased sales of their commercial products.

Companies like Mathworks are starting to see the light and offer home versions of their products for a fraction of what the full commercial version costs.

[james_s]

EDA tools don't matter so much, if you can use one, you can pick up another. What I'm thinking of are microcontrollers, FPGAs, stuff where you have one choice you *need* to use in order to develop with that hardware. If you want me to buy your hardware, you should provide the required tools to use it for free. Make money selling the hardware.

[mtdoc]

Hmm what else, oh, LabView for sure.

Labview has their "Home Bundle" for non-commercial use. You can get it through Digilent for $50.

[thm_w]

To be fair to Solidworks, though, I did notice that they may have some kind of program where you can buy basically an educational copy of the SW for like $250 or something but IIRC there are limits like only being able to do it once and having the license expire without renewability after like 6 months or 1 year or such, as well as IIRC some significant feature restrictions (I'm not sure).  The time limit (IIRC) was offputting because as I'd be learning only in my "spare time" (and I'm not a ME) I didn't think that would be enough time for me to become proficient in it after only a couple of hundred hours max. here and there of working with it.  If it was a 2-5 year or unlimited self education license it would have made more sense.  That and even $250 was not affordable for something that would probably expire before I was done with it and which competed with other financial necessities.

Solidworks has a 1 year student version for free. It took a bit of searching to find it when I last looked (hint some schools offer it for free, and have publicly accessible websites).
AFAIK there are no restrictions, but it will put a little hat icon on your drawings to indicate it was drawn by a student.

If you need to keep using after a year, I'm sure you can uninstall or use a new email or something.

The paid version is $150 for one year: https://store.solidworks.com/studentstore/default.php

[bson]

EDA tools don't matter so much, if you can use one, you can pick up another. What I'm thinking of are microcontrollers, FPGAs, stuff where you have one choice you *need* to use in order to develop with that hardware. If you want me to buy your hardware, you should provide the required tools to use it for free. Make money selling the hardware.

TI clearly went down this path with CCS 7, deciding they're a hardware manufacturer, not a software studio.  A good move IMO. 

[Sal Ammoniac]

http://www2.keil.com/stmicroelectronics-stm32/mdk
https://community.st.com/thread/34347-keil-ide-free-of-charge-of-stm32l0-and-stm32f0
http://www.st.com/en/development-tools/mdk-arm-stm32.html

Doesn't help me. I use the STM32F4 and F7 parts, not the F0 and L0.

[Sal Ammoniac]

TI clearly went down this path with CCS 7, deciding they're a hardware manufacturer, not a software studio.  A good move IMO. 

Bravo to TI. I suspect other companies don't do this because they consider the tools division a separate business unit that has to show a profit (or at least not too big a loss). They don't consider the offsetting increase in chip sales that may accrue from giving the tools away free.

[technix]

http://www2.keil.com/stmicroelectronics-stm32/mdk
https://community.st.com/thread/34347-keil-ide-free-of-charge-of-stm32l0-and-stm32f0
http://www.st.com/en/development-tools/mdk-arm-stm32.html

Doesn't help me. I use the STM32F4 and F7 parts, not the F0 and L0.

At least for ARM, the FOSS stack GCC+OpenOCD+CMSIS-DAP is surprisingly efficient.

So far among all dev platforms the most comfortable for me to use happened to be Eclipse CDT + GCC ARM Eclipse + GNU ARM Embedded toolchain + J-Link on OS X, targeting ARM Cortex-M.

[legacy]

when I read all the above, I wonder why I did not study to become an ice cream man 

[obiwanjacobi]

Simple, because its a B2B business. The ROI of this hobby crap is horrible.   

[asgard20032]

There are studies for that?

[CatalinaWOW]

If you want to make this happen the way to go is to provide solid data.  Everything I see is hand waving, and the emotions of the decision makers are as valid as yours.

Saying that hobby licenses will not poach commercial sales is clearly not true.  There will be some number who cheat.   How many?  Who knows.
One approach to dealing with this is to make the line between hobby and pro use softer.  Fix a dollar amount of annual sales allowed on a hobby license.  That would allow startups to legally get off the ground, transitioning to the pro version when cash flow can actually cover the bill.  And would also provide at least some numerical data on the transition from hobby to pro sales.

Saying that hobby use will lead to professional use and/or part selection.  Obviously there is some truth to this, but how do you quantify it?  The balance of this value with the losses from poaching is what will make the decision for the various software vendors. 

It seems obvious to me that the numbers are overwhelming for TI.  But they are in a very different place than many software vendors.

[MrBungle]

Autodesk (think AutoCAD, Inventor) provide Fusion360 Ultimate 3D CAD/5-axis CAM free for enthusiasts/hobbyists and startups (less than $100k) for 1 year, renewable. 3 years for student.

Edit: spelin

[CatalinaWOW]

By the way, for those of you with degrees, or extensive experience, what we in the US call Junior Colleges (two year institutions which either provide prep courses for a full university or vocational/community interest education) are often in need of teaching staff.  They often prefer part time help because the employment costs are significantly lower.  Frequently teaching only one class a semester.

If you can land one of these positions you get access as faculty to all of those educational software discounts.  You may save more than you earn.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Saying that hobby licenses will not poach commercial sales is clearly not true.  There will be some number who cheat.

Yes, there will be people who cheat, but probably not many, and not enough to make a real difference to the bottom line. Any reputable company will not cheat like this.

[CatalinaWOW]

Saying that hobby licenses will not poach commercial sales is clearly not true.  There will be some number who cheat.

Yes, there will be people who cheat, but probably not many, and not enough to make a real difference to the bottom line. Any reputable company will not cheat like this.

As engineers and technicians we should always be leary of unsupported assertions like this.  I requires two numbers that have not been made publicly available to evaluate this. 

First it needs the percentage of cheaters.  I suspect it is far less than half, and more than a tenth of a percent, but that is a guess with obviously wide error bounds.  I believe that your assertion falls within the error bounds I suggest, but the assertion that it hurts no ones bottom line in a meaningful way may well be sensitive to the exact value.  Highly publicized events over the last few years involving large international companies like VW, Wells Fargo Bank, Enron and others indicates that size and reputation are not complete defenses against unethical behavior.

Secondly, it requires the sensitivity of a given software companies bottom line to this cheating.  There is clearly no general answer to this, and it can only be guessed in most cases.  The TI example is one of the few where the answer is obvious, their hardware sales so far outweigh the sales of their software tools that you can confidently assert that their bottom line is little affected by this issue.  Even in those cases the livelihood of the managers and employees of a large department may suffer even though the company as a whole is only marginally effected. 

There were certainly companies at the dawn of the personal computer era whose software was used illegally far more than it was sold.  Most cases fall somewhere in between, but even the companies involved usually can't answer the question accurately because no good data exists to differentiate a cheating user from someone who just wouldn't have used the software if they were unable to cheat.

My whole point in this is not that lots of people are cheating, but that when trying to convince an organization to adopt a software distribution policy that they perceive as threatening it is not sufficient to express your opinion.  "Don't worry, it will be fine."  Your argument will be more successful if you can surface actual factual evidence that the policy proposed will not hurt, that in fact it will help sales.  And as I suggest here, the data required is likely to be significantly different for different software distributors.

[james_s]

Saying that hobby licenses will not poach commercial sales is clearly not true.  There will be some number who cheat.

Yes, there will be people who cheat, but probably not many, and not enough to make a real difference to the bottom line. Any reputable company will not cheat like this.

That and if they're going to cheat like that, they might as well cheat and just pirate the whole program.

I figure most companies will buy the product in order to obtain support.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Saying that hobby licenses will not poach commercial sales is clearly not true.  There will be some number who cheat.

Yes, there will be people who cheat, but probably not many, and not enough to make a real difference to the bottom line. Any reputable company will not cheat like this.

That and if they're going to cheat like that, they might as well cheat and just pirate the whole program.

I figure most companies will buy the product in order to obtain support.

This. The two posts prior to your's make interesting points, but they're over thinking the issue. As you said, anyone who'd stoop to cheating by using hobbyist licenses probably wouldn't bother--they'd just pirate the program and pay nothing.

Real companies don't take chances by doing questionable things to get software--they do the right thing--because the consequences are not worth the risk.

Even pirated software (and I'm not advocating the practice) helps to get a vendor's name more well known and probably results in increased legitimate sales. It certainly didn't hurt that tiny, not very well-known company called MicroSoft back in the late 1970s.

[nctnico]

Even pirated software (and I'm not advocating the practice) helps to get a vendor's name more well known and probably results in increased legitimate sales. It certainly didn't hurt that tiny, not very well-known company called MicroSoft back in the late 1970s.

I'm convinced big companies spread cracked copies of their software in upcoming economies on purpose. At some point copyright laws will be enforced and they can start cashing in on a vendor lock-in. Better give away software for free than risking a competing low cost package being developed and becoming a standard. I've been in shops in Asia where you can buy every major software package (cracked) for a few dollars per CD/DVD.

[legacy]

I've been in shops in Asia where you can buy every major software package (cracked) for a few dollars per CD/DVD.

Yup, or a laptop preloaded with the software you need, for 100 USD 
Asia and Russia are on Copy-Left 

[aandrew]

Doesn't help me. I use the STM32F4 and F7 parts, not the F0 and L0.

I really don't understand why everyone flocks to Keil. Every time I've had to use their tools I've been left frustrated.

Give me CubeMX and a standard Makefile and GNU toolchain. I don't want the IDE, Eclipse is just a burden and additional layer of crap. I've got two editors I love (Sublime Text and vim), I've got gdb and sometimes use Segger's Ozone debugger. This takes care of a full 99% of my professional embedded software development tool needs which are AVR and ARM, including embedded ARM on Altera and Xilinx SoCs and radio SoCs such as Nordic and Cypress. I've even got the PIC tools (including flashing, but not debugging) working from the command line.

I keep looking at Atollic's offering; they seem to really be doing amazing things with ARM debugging, although until they come out with their cross platform toolset I will keep it at arms-length.

Chacon son gout, but embedded dev tools don't have to be expensive to be pro.

[mjs]

We're going with GNU toolchain because of continuous integration setup is a pain with commercial licenses. Now we're integrating hardware in the loop for testing things like device drivers and verify sleep current consumption for all changes on all hardware revisions.

Anyone else doing HIL+CI setups ?

[technix]

Even pirated software (and I'm not advocating the practice) helps to get a vendor's name more well known and probably results in increased legitimate sales. It certainly didn't hurt that tiny, not very well-known company called MicroSoft back in the late 1970s.

I'm convinced big companies spread cracked copies of their software in upcoming economies on purpose. At some point copyright laws will be enforced and they can start cashing in on a vendor lock-in. Better give away software for free than risking a competing low cost package being developed and becoming a standard. I've been in shops in Asia where you can buy every major software package (cracked) for a few dollars per CD/DVD.

Paraphrasing Bill Gates: If someone have to pirate software, I'd like to see it being ours (referring to Microsoft Windows and Office being pirated like crazy in China.)

During their free upgrade to Windows 10 period, they had a special "feature" for Chinese users: regardless whether your original copy of Windows 7/8.1 is genuine or pirated you are getting a free genuine upgrade license to Windows 10, tied to your PC's motherboard via digital rights (so it can survive you wiping and upgrading your hard drive.) Effectively it allowed users of pirated Windows 7/8.1 in China to whitewash their copy of Windows to a genuine copy of Windows 10 upon upgrading.

So I'd like to say that at least some software vendors do not disallow pirating in emerging economies, with the hope of locking the users into their ecosystem.

[yuzuha]

This. The two posts prior to your's make interesting points, but they're over thinking the issue. As you said, anyone who'd stoop to cheating by using hobbyist licenses probably wouldn't bother--they'd just pirate the program and pay nothing.

Real companies don't take chances by doing questionable things to get software--they do the right thing--because the consequences are not worth the risk.

Even pirated software (and I'm not advocating the practice) helps to get a vendor's name more well known and probably results in increased legitimate sales. It certainly didn't hurt that tiny, not very well-known company called MicroSoft back in the late 1970s.

The solution is write good software.   I pirated Wordperfect 4.something and loved it.  So, the Wordperfect corporation had a check on their desk for version 5.0 before it was even released.  ('course then it went down the sewers a few years later when Novell and then Corel bought it)   Do it shareware or have cheaper non-commercial versions that do not need internet checkups.

Wish they would do something though... I'm semi disabled, retired on a fixed income and there is no place around here to play school so any gear or software I manage to get is very dear to me.

[thm_w]

I just checked the latest SolidWorks eligibility for their Student version and I find that they've either made it more restricted or my past recollection that anyone could buy/use it for personal education was wrong.   So those who are unemployed or pursuing ongoing skill development / maintenance independently of work / school are out of luck unless they're in a full academic degree program ladder.  So if just taking a quick 1, 2, 5 day paid training class / seminar / workshop isn't enough for your needs then you're stuck without a good option short of something close to being a full time student taking enough units in enough different (even unrelated to one's technical needs/interests) classes in a semester to qualify for their "degree seeking program" restriction.
These companies ought to be as generous with the continuing education talent pool as they are with high schoolers since, even forgetting hobbyists, it can only benefit them to have people keep up / grow their skills. 

You worry too much IMO. If you are interested in learning the software, you will find a way to acquire it.

36 hours of solidworks training is $7-800 at local schools in my area, if you want to rigidly follow solidworks licensing rules, then thats your option.

[westfw]

I suspect a lot of companies would "cheat" "somewhat"; not so much not buying a copy, but not buying a copy for each engineer, or not getting the more expensive multi-seat licenses to cover everyone who uses it.   "We bought our official copy to do our production compiles, and another copy for Joe Senior, our top engineer.   The rest of you low-level employees should just use the freeware version."
(which is, in turn, because many of default site licenses are pretty sucky, and negotiating a non-sucky license is moderately difficult.)
(whether there would be any difference in profit for the SW company between this sort of cheating, and a negotiated user-friendly site license, is a separate question.

Related: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/going-quot-for-profit-quot/td-p/6900000

[james_s]

Companies I've worked at were very careful to have enough properly licensed copies of software for everyone using it. They do get checked for this sort of thing.

More than once though I saw the protection dongle locked away in a cabinet with a crack applied to the software in use due to problems with the protection.

[nctnico]

More than once though I saw the protection dongle locked away in a cabinet with a crack applied to the software in use due to problems with the protection.

That is how I run my software. In some cases the original is still in it's shrink wrap. Dealing with registrations and getting/transferring licenses is just too much hassle.

[KL27x]

Seems to me that hobbiests prefer to spend more money on their toys. Pros will use w/e reliably gets the job done. In case of software, this is not true, though. We don't like paying for software, lol.

Heck, 1500 vs 150. I don't even care anymore about the writeoff. I own a company, but maybe I am going to buy the software license for my own personal hobby. Then magically it gets used for business? This feels now like a white lie, lol. How is anyone going to prove that?

It might be better if there was one fixed cost, low enough to entice many hobbiests to purchase. Heck, if it were cheap enough, you might hold several competitors software licenses at a time for slight differences here and there. I suppose for highly specialized software, this model is simply not feasible.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Heck, 1500 vs 150. I don't even care anymore about the writeoff. I own a company, but maybe I am going to buy the software license for my own personal hobby. Then magically it gets used for business? This feels now like a white lie, lol. How is anyone going to prove that?

Companies that stoop to this probably would just go all the way and outright pirate a tool rather than paying anything at all for it.

[james_s]

Seems to me that hobbiests prefer to spend more money on their toys. Pros will use w/e reliably gets the job done. In case of software, this is not true, though. We don't like paying for software, lol.

A hobbyist only has to justify a tool purchase to themselves, maybe their wife. Getting an employer to purchase a tool is often an uphill battle so if it's easier to get by with what is on hand than fight that battle, I'll get by with what I have.

[technix]

My employer hired me with the intention of letting me set up a FOSS-based workflow for him, so he can safely drop the licenses of Keli when the current ones expire.

I am bring them the toolset I have used on my private projects: Eclipse, GCC, OpenOCD and CMSIS-DAP. We do have a few broken J-Links in the office that I managed to fix so they are incorporated into the workflow too. That is the only non FOSS part of the tool chain.

[RedSpanner]

I've been using a hobbyist version of Mathematica through 3, maybe 4 versions... cost me $99 USD initially, but everytime I've upgraded, it has cost me a little more. The tool is fabulous for math-intensive stuff (RF work, information theory, other cool stuff), but it's worked out well for Wolfram (the publisher), too -- they've made ~$500 USD off me over 5-6 years, just so I can "scratch a math itch" for tech weenie stuff I was interested in...

Bottom line is, these "hobbyist sales" are generating incremental revenue for products whose main focus is in technically-challenging and high-value (financially-deep) applications. Since the kicker for many of these "hobbyist-grade" products is 'no technical support', the marginal cost of selling these products at a large discount to hobbyists is near zero $... The margin is probably north of 90%, so any incremental revenue goes right to the bottom line! Plus, the vendor gets the 'goodwill and familiarity' bonus as well!

Vendors who miss this opportunity are really missing out on something.

 

[legacy]

hobbyist version of Mathematica

why are you upgrading it? which is the reason?

[HSPalm]

TI clearly went down this path with CCS 7, deciding they're a hardware manufacturer, not a software studio.  A good move IMO. 

Bravo to TI. I suspect other companies don't do this because they consider the tools division a separate business unit that has to show a profit (or at least not too big a loss). They don't consider the offsetting increase in chip sales that may accrue from giving the tools away free.

Atmel (Microchip) and Microchip have both made free IDE with free compilers. ST at least lists the Open Source alternatives for IDEs alongside Keil and IAR at their webpage. I know it doesn't get as much support, nearly, but still they at least recognize it.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Atmel (Microchip) and Microchip have both made free IDE with free compilers. ST at least lists the Open Source alternatives for IDEs alongside Keil and IAR at their webpage. I know it doesn't get as much support, nearly, but still they at least recognize it.

Good for them. I encourage more vendors to go that route.

In the mean time, IMO the best option for hobbyists is Rowley CrossWorks for ARM. It's the full tool with nothing disabled or limited for USD$150. To me this is a bargain as everything just works out of the box and it's cross-platform too.

[technix]

Atmel (Microchip) and Microchip have both made free IDE with free compilers. ST at least lists the Open Source alternatives for IDEs alongside Keil and IAR at their webpage. I know it doesn't get as much support, nearly, but still they at least recognize it.

Good for them. I encourage more vendors to go that route.

In the mean time, IMO the best option for hobbyists is Rowley CrossWorks for ARM. It's the full tool with nothing disabled or limited for USD$150. To me this is a bargain as everything just works out of the box and it's cross-platform too.

I am still standing on GNU ARM Embedded toolchain under Eclipse CDT IDE. Fully open source, costs $0, have no restrictions, and you can get the full source code too.

[mrm2007]

http://www2.keil.com/stmicroelectronics-stm32/mdk
https://community.st.com/thread/34347-keil-ide-free-of-charge-of-stm32l0-and-stm32f0
http://www.st.com/en/development-tools/mdk-arm-stm32.html

Doesn't help me. I use the STM32F4 and F7 parts, not the F0 and L0.

Hi,

 Did you see SW4STM32 from ST? (Basically is Eclipse + GCC + ... in one package , for Windows+MAC OS X + Linux), It has a plugin from AC-6 Systems which is free for STM32 Series Software Development (even for commercial use if i remember correctly)
 
http://www.st.com/en/development-tools/sw4stm32.html
http://www.openstm32.org/HomePage