General > General Technical Chat

Is Altium free anywhere?

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EEVblog:

--- Quote from: nctnico on May 14, 2023, 10:21:28 pm ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

Yes, it's not a bad thign to have everyone using a pirated version of sofwtare making it the defacto standard. Makes it easier to try and convert people over to actually paying for it.
But what I'm saying is that they didn't deliberately do that, it's just the situation they found themselves in.

floobydust:
It's a monopoly that old CADD dinosaurs have, as far as corporate use. It's got roots in the products developed, so big corps stay with it, recurring revenue. Although switching between Altium, Orcad, Mentor I've been through- it can be done. Capturing EE students with Uni courses using Altium really helps.

Nobody appears to be at the wheel, over at Altium.
Orphaned cloud-based products with no press release about their lifecycle.
No innovation in features that are really needed. Does anyone there get off the golf course and manage the product from a PCB designer's point of view?
I dislike the UI because it is always maximum mouse clicks. It's a scientific UI design, click click click click and click. Hello carpal tunnel syndrome.

Massive bungling of their fucking libraries over the years, everyone has to make their own footprints from scratch over and over and over again towards trusted libraries.
I think Kicad I have not tried but there seem to be libraries that are community-checked for errors and not part of some leach librarian company that can have component errors and fat bloated 3D models.

Kicad needs an Altium importer and that would likely crater the dinosaur?

SiliconWizard:
KiCad can import Altium's schematics, but not the layouts nor libraries yet, that I know of.

That said, there will be some work before KiCad can crater AD, even if it's a dinosaur.

tom66:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 14, 2023, 09:50:49 pm ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

Weirdly have the opposite opinion.  MS Office isn't great, lots of weird formatting bugs.  But far better than LibreOffice and I refuse to use anything other than the MS product for office tasks. 

But for CAD, I think KiCAD is there for 90% of use cases.  One of the bigger hurdles will be getting engineers and contractors familiar with the package.  If you advertise for a contract role for a guy with Altium experience, you'll fill it quickly.  (We use contractors for PCB design - it wasn't and isn't my decision.)  For KiCAD I suspect you'll be waiting for some time.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: tom66 on May 15, 2023, 07:00:46 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on May 14, 2023, 09:50:49 pm ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

Weirdly have the opposite opinion.  MS Office isn't great, lots of weird formatting bugs.  But far better than LibreOffice and I refuse to use anything other than the MS product for office tasks. 

--- End quote ---
Offtopic: Google's online word processing and spreadsheet are actually pretty good. It has improved a lot during the past couple of years. Every now and then I'm using the spreadsheet part of Libreoffice and that works quite well; it is better at importing CSV files compared to Excel. IOW: If you are basing your opinion on past experiences, you might want to retry.

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