there was altium presentation here few weeks ago and from talking to altium trainer and altium salesman
- altium want to offer "crippled" version but attm they still do not know how it will look like and how much it will cost
- they expect huge "umpf" from the vault
- they have number of ppl adding components to the vault
- there is some "voting" system on altium cloud where customers vote for features and bugs and the priority of the features and bugs is determined from there only so what's first on the list is being worked on. this system is invisible to "non registered users" so I was not able to look at it, someone could check and report back
- 14.0 is out with huge number of bugs and they know about it, the flex features are very very buggy and they know about it but decision was to better push out unfinished feature and then fix it with patches then not to push it out at all. 14.2.0 solves most of the known bugs, still some bugs exist but afaik "nothing serious"
not related to the this presentation but maybe interesting to the conversation about availability (I'm not suggesting anyone use illegal version of Altium)
- until few days ago latest illegal version available was 14.1.5.30772
- since few days ago 14.2.4 is available
- compared with 13.x that comes with libraries, 14.x only comes with some fpga libs and few basic libs and that's it, not a single op-amp in all libraries that come with 14.x for example
if ($altium_noncommercial_price <=500$) & ($yearly_vault_components_subscription <=50$) & ($upgrade_to_minor_version = 0) & ($upgrade_to_major_version <=50$) & ($limitation_layers >= 2) & ($limitation_size >= A4) {$get_altium=1; $switch_to_altium=1;} else { $invest_in_kicad=1; $work_in_kicad=1; $work_in_eagle=1;}
I personally don't care about commercial licence, IMO $5k is ok for commercial licence or $50k or $500k .. whoever is using it commercially have brain to calculate what's good for him..