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Is Altium free anywhere?
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tom66:

--- Quote from: Faringdon on May 14, 2023, 01:55:18 pm ---
--- Quote ---Altium spent a long time watching with tears in their eyes as practically the entire Chinese design market uses Altium 99SE for free, it was the industry standard, and they couldn't do anything about it.
--- End quote ---
Thanks, this is what i'd also heard...it can only be a matter  of time, before goverments round the rest of the world realise, that they must make either Altium, or an "Altium equivalent", free of charge in their own countries,  otherwise they wont be able to compete.
(ie buy out Altium and dish it out for free, or just encourage say KICAD more, say)

--- End quote ---

If you seriously believe that the thing making the UK or other Western nations less competitive for engineering is Altium being free, you're nuts.  Sorry if that offends you, but it's just so far down on the list of reasons.   
tooki:

--- Quote from: Faringdon on May 14, 2023, 02:34:57 pm ---..............Whilst we wait for @Simon to hopefully answer....ill speak on KICAD if i may.....i am certain it will stay free of charge, and will become "THE ONE". Knocking all others out of its way.....Unless Altium perhaps is bought out, and then dished out for free everywhere.....dont honestly known how Altium fully compares to KICAD, but am told KICAD is just as good....and can do the same high end stuff.

--- End quote ---
Not in a million years.

OK, maybe in a million years. But right now, KiCad can't hold a candle to Altium or the other professional programs. Can you make it produce excellent boards? Absolutely. Does it support you in doing so the same way Altium can? Absolutely not.

Basically, "KiCad is just as good as Altium" is a typical open-source software fanboy claim. It's just as untrue as the claims that "LibreOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office" or "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop". In every case, the open-source program can do all of the basics (and then some), but simply cannot compete with the feature sets that those established commercial programs built up over the course of decades.


While I have every reason to believe that open-source server software (servers, databases, etc.) can do everything their commercial counterparts can, that simply isn't the case for desktop software. The fact that no open source desktop app has ever managed to dethrone its commercial counterparts... well that speaks volumes -- s does the fact that in many cases, open source server software has dethroned commercial equivalents. That means the market is willing to go open source when it's good enough. And the corollary that open source desktop software just isn't there. (Nor do I think it ever will on the whole, for various reasons, but that's well beyond the scope of this discussion.)



As for your trouble with Altium: You really need to just watch some tutorials or something. I gave an Altium primer to the apprentices at my old work, and had them designing a little board in under 2 hours.
Faringdon:
Thanks, being mentally challenged certainly doesnt help me learn Altium......but i got Eagle cracked inside of a day, and layed out an involved 4 layer board within 24 hours of using it.
Being free, there were really good tutorials/vids available for Eagle.
Simon:

--- Quote from: tooki on May 14, 2023, 02:26:14 pm ---
--- Quote from: Simon on May 14, 2023, 12:38:23 pm ---KiCAD is quite usable, I went back to it after my escapade with circuit studio which is just Altium Designer really without the later features.

--- End quote ---
Out of curiosity, what pushed you away from Circuit Studio towards KiCad?

--- End quote ---

CS had a very non illustrious career, it started out as overpriced and incredibly unstable from what I heard. By the time I bought into it the £2500 license was £900, then they did an "offer" for £400 and that offer never ended. I felt rather slighted as weeks after shelling out so much for such a poor product they made it clear that they would charge whatever it took to get people to buy it. So Farringdon, if you want AD then just buy CS assuming they are not giving it away now.

Clearly CS was just a means to get you into AD, Farnell distribute it exclusively and Altium do not provide any support that is up to Farnell. Support was done by one bloke at Farnell. So Altium have no interest in CS, it is a crimpled piece of garbage. So bad that things like a BOM export required microsoft office and the export process took about 10 minutes (I am deadly serious). Any time I could not do something that you would think obviously such a program could do and contacted "support" I got back an email telling me that there was not a problem, you could do this if you used this long procedure. It was just silly. The last time I paid for the licence the bugs were not fixed, instead they added 3 features that were of no practical value like PDF export, pointless, you could already export a step file, and if you were deing 3D CAD your 3D CAD program would be able to spit out a 3D PDF. I just gave up.

Naturally Altium have been after me ever since the day I bought it to buy AD, just a few days ago I replied to another email encouraging me to AD and told them to get lost.
Simon:

--- Quote from: Faringdon on May 14, 2023, 01:55:18 pm ---
--- Quote ---Altium spent a long time watching with tears in their eyes as practically the entire Chinese design market uses Altium 99SE for free, it was the industry standard, and they couldn't do anything about it.
--- End quote ---
Thanks, this is what i'd also heard...it can only be a matter  of time, before goverments round the rest of the world realise, that they must make either Altium, or an "Altium equivalent", free of charge in their own countries,  otherwise they wont be able to compete.
(ie buy out Altium and dish it out for free, or just encourage say KICAD more, say)

--- End quote ---

I don't know what sort of fantasy land you live in. What has a national government got to do with how a private company distributes software? just because you can't have your expensive toy you want someone else to foot the bill. For goodness sake, what is it about AD that means you can't do your poxy SMPS designs in KiCAD like the rest of us?
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