General > General Technical Chat
Is Altium free anywhere?
nctnico:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 14, 2023, 04:30:21 pm ---
--- 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...
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Kicad more or less killed Eagle (with a bit of help from Autodesk though) and several other low end PCB design packages. And Altium will be next in a couple of years. Altium may have a lot of features but the bugs and extremely low performance make that Altium sits between a rock and a hard place. It is too expensive to do simple boards with and it is not good enough for complex boards. Every SoC reference design I have come across is made using Orcad.
langwadt:
--- Quote from: Simon on May 14, 2023, 07:09:00 pm ---
--- 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?
--- End quote ---
did you not see who the poster is?
Simon:
I did :)
Zero999:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 14, 2023, 04:30:21 pm ---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"
--- End quote ---
I don't know about Altium vs KiCAD, but I have to disagree with you about LibreOffice vs MS Office. I find MS Office virtually unusable. It's appalling. LibreOffice is much better. I've taken work home, just so I can use LibreOffice, because MS Office is too slow and clunky. It's not a matter of taking time to get used to it. I've used plenty of other GUIs in my time, not just on Windows, but other platforms and have definitely found MS Office to be one of the worst.
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 14, 2023, 01:42:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on May 14, 2023, 11:27:56 am ---You can. But it depends on the jurisdiction you are in and thus whether copyright is enforced. I don't think I'm telling anyone something new when I state that companies like Altium are very likely to create holes in their licensing system on purpose in order to gain traction in markets where they can't get into due to their pricing. Once those markets mature and the legal system improves, the money is raked in. See it like university licensing; get people used to a product and they are likely to keep using the product in their professional career. And this is not something that happens only far away. I've spend quite a few years in various jobs where the software provided by the company wasn't paid for.
--- End 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.
They still struggled when I was there, and are still struggling today to convert these into legit licenses I'm sure.
They don't do it deliberately.
--- End quote ---
It's certainly true China's weak copyright system has benefited them hugely. It's very naive to believe it'll change soon. Plenty of people have said the same about democracy following wealth, but Singapore has demonstrated it doesn't always follow.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 14, 2023, 01:42:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on May 14, 2023, 11:27:56 am ---You can. But it depends on the jurisdiction you are in and thus whether copyright is enforced. I don't think I'm telling anyone something new when I state that companies like Altium are very likely to create holes in their licensing system on purpose in order to gain traction in markets where they can't get into due to their pricing. Once those markets mature and the legal system improves, the money is raked in. See it like university licensing; get people used to a product and they are likely to keep using the product in their professional career. And this is not something that happens only far away. I've spend quite a few years in various jobs where the software provided by the company wasn't paid for.
--- End 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.
They still struggled when I was there, and are still struggling today to convert these into legit licenses I'm sure.
They don't do it deliberately.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, but how can near 100% market penetration be bad? Ofcourse nobody will officially admit that they tolerate piracy (not internally or externally). But financially it is a huge win as it takes zero marketing costs to win new customers. The customers are there, locked into the ecosystem and they only need to be made to pay. Imagine a Chinese company made a PCB design package and Altium would need to try and penetrate that market? It is almost a lost cause.
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