Free Altium is Coming

[george graves]

I tried quickly - didn't find anything.

[zapta]

I have two complains, why only for Windows? sure, it takes a lot of resources to make that happen, and why not letting us to save files locally?     

Very good points.

[Richard Crowley]

If you were in business to make a profit (vs operating a charity), would you invest your development resources into the 90% market share, or the 10% market share?  It is as simple as that.  Perhaps people who have never run a profitable business will never understand that.

Clearly they are limiting storage to THEIR "cloud" (what an overused buzzword!) to limit users to hobbyists. I wonder how they will manage sending the Gerbers (or whatever) to the board fab?  Will they resort to a proprietary file format and lease the decoder (for a royalty) to the board fabs?

[miguelvp]

Seems to me they are stored locally but also on the cloud for sharing and collaboration, we are assuming too many things without anyone being in the closed beta.

[zapta]

If you were in business to make a profit (vs operating a charity), would you invest your development resources into the 90% market share, or the 10% market share?  It is as simple as that.  Perhaps people who have never run a profitable business will never understand that.

That's not a strong argument. There are many products from for-profit companies that run also on non Windows platform, for example the direct competitors of Circuit Maker.

[zapta]

Good catch! Neat rendering none the less. I should reverse image search it, see where it came from.

Already did ;-) no match, just dark looking science fiction images.  Probably Altium's original.

[ludzinc]

Can't help but to notice in the first picture I posted, it seems to be saving to a local drive(see the title bar)?  No?

I don't get it - I see a file name, but not a local path.

Am I missing something?

[george graves]

C:\SVN\CS Designers\arduino\................

Is that not a locally stored file?

[ruffy91]

I like the TOU on the website. If thei have the same TOUs in the software they'll get stomped into the ground.

"08
Idea Submission
While Altium remains committed to listening to its users about improving products or services, you understand that any ideas, inventions or materials (collectively, “Materials”) that you submit to Altium using the Website shall become the exclusive property of Altium and by submitting the same you relinquish all rights in the Materials upon their submission and waive any right to hold Altium liable for its use of or failure to use such Materials in any way.
"

[tautech]

I like the TOU on the website. If thei have the same TOUs in the software they'll get stomped into the ground.

"08
Idea Submission
While Altium remains committed to listening to its users about improving products or services, you understand that any ideas, inventions or materials (collectively, “Materials”) that you submit to Altium using the Website shall become the exclusive property of Altium and by submitting the same you relinquish all rights in the Materials upon their submission and waive any right to hold Altium liable for its use of or failure to use such Materials in any way.
"

+1 Stomp stomp stomp.

Just exactly what did people think when announcement declared it would be "cloud based storage"  

Now show Altium just what you think about this with a vote in mikeselectricstuff's poll:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-free-version/msg513318/#msg513318

[ludzinc]

C:\SVN\CS Designers\arduino\................

Is that not a locally stored file?

My bad - here at work your first image is blocked and I looked in via at the second...

Please please please be true!

[Precipice]

I like the TOU on the website. If thei have the same TOUs in the software they'll get stomped into the ground.

They're just stopping people trying to sue them for making changes in the software, on the 'oo, that was my idea, give me money' theme.

That's a completely different thing to grabbing the rights of user generated content, Thingiverse style. Worth watching to make sure they don't, but I don't think this is related.

[george graves]

That's a completely different thing to grabbing the rights of user generated content, Thingiverse style. Worth watching to make sure they don't, but I don't think this is related.

And how well did that work out for thingiverse/makerbot?  Not well.  They more-or-less lost support from makers and hacker spaces after that.  And that was before going closed-sourced.

[BloodyCactus]

If you were in business to make a profit (vs operating a charity), would you invest your development resources into the 90% market share, or the 10% market share?  It is as simple as that.  Perhaps people who have never run a profitable business will never understand that

when your giving the tool away for free does it matter if you target the 90% or 10% market. Free is $0 at any %. the key will be, how many of those people will buy options/upgrades etc. I suspect it wont be much of a conversion % unless options are really cheap but who knows eh

[c4757p]

C:\SVN\CS Designers\arduino\................

Is that not a locally stored file?

Remember - if it's cloud-only, they'll need an alternative storage system while they're developing the cloud storage. I'm sure there's a compile option to allow local files for use by the developers, it just might not be enabled when you get the software.

[george graves]

That totally makes sense.  It's just that, that picture was taken off the official web site. 

[Precipice]

[when your giving the tool away for free does it matter if you target the 90% or 10% market. Free is $0 at any %

Huh? If you're not trying to make your money off direct sales, are you not committed to doing whatever it is that you do, to the widest possible audience?
Taken to extremes, giving a spiffy tool to a dozen users, no matter how enthusiastic - unless they've got cash to throw at you, it's not going to pay back the effort.

[miguelvp]

Google is free to use and they sure can monetize it, tons of other free things can monetize so your any percent of free math is way wrong

[Zad]

If you want to see how "free" makes money, then go to your smartphone and open the store app. Look at the number of free games available for it. Those "free" games are making not just millions of pounds a year, but billions. If mobile games are a bit of a conceptual leap from EDA software, how about this: Red Hat made its money out of supporting Linux, and is currently worth $10 Billion.

I want to underline what someone else said earlier about giving credit to people who upload component models. If they really want their sharing thing to take off, then what better way to reward contributions and build the product? Time-limited functionality should be a no-no though, you should be able to upgrade it permanently. If functionality really is so dynamically configurable without software or even OS restarts, then that would probably indicate something as simple as a registry setting. I could see people renting all the "toys" for a week, downloading libraries to cache, and then snapshotting the software, and blocking the license server. Lets face it, if people can get around oscilloscope embedded firmware upgrades, then PC software will be a walk in the park for them.

[EEVblog]

Here are some screen shots Altium gave to me to share:

[EEVblog]

more:

[mikefatom]

This is like Altium meets MS Office!  Jokes aside, it looks nice and clean.  I'm optimistic.

[Ondre]

Oh no, the office menu! Where's clippy? Anyway, I'm going to test it. It doesn't look bad!

[george graves]

Much more complex looking then I imagined!

I assumed they would strip down the tool to a "ExpressPCB" level



I totally assumed they were marketing to the "My first PCB" crowd.  Or a "I want to make an arduino shield" guys.  With a few fab houses that could send you a board when you finished.

But this looks more like an eagle/ki-cad killer.  Totally didn't see that coming.

I can only assume Dave is under a NDA, or he would spill the bean!  Dame you and your NDA Dave - spill the beans! 

Still, I want my design on my hard drive and in my back up, and my version control.  Not in the cloud.

And no.  I'm not going to share my parts list with strangers.  That's like posting picture of my underwear drawer to the internet.  You don't need to see my boxers, and I really, really don't want to see yours.

[penfold]

If you want your design on your hard drive the answer may be to pay for your software!
Just sayin', they have have to have some incentive for you to upgrade your membership if your designs are that sensitive.  Considering they'er permitting some commercial work I wouldn't be surprised if there's a clause that states that the online storage doesn't meet requirements for engineering design management standards