Author Topic: Is Altium free anywhere?  (Read 12363 times)

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Offline EEVblog

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #25 on: May 15, 2023, 02:41:25 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.

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.
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.

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.
 
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Offline floobydust

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #26 on: May 15, 2023, 04:02:03 am »
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?
 
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #27 on: May 15, 2023, 04:45:10 am »
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.
 
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Offline tom66

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #28 on: May 15, 2023, 07:00:46 am »
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"
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.

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.
 

Offline nctnico

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #29 on: May 15, 2023, 07:19:59 am »
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"
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.

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. 
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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Offline hans

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #30 on: May 15, 2023, 07:22:06 am »

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?

Maybe I'm biased, or I'm a dinosaur as well.. But libraries = Always make your own. I imported a Kicad design from 2021 the other day. Used the TPS63000 DC/DC chip from library. The libraries schematic symbol changed. It got migrated into my schematic and so RIP that design.

IMO using externeral dependencies is always a shortcut. I made that design as a tryout for KiCad, and from time to time I open the design files since I need to fix some hardware issue on a batch of boards I've had assembled at JLC. Its very offputting that for every new Kicad version I install, it is nagging me with increasingly more popups on things to migrat from their library on the schematic or PCB. IMO this is a pure no-go for any CAD software that needs to support archivable designs.

Importers are always a pain IMO. It's just not the same as native, as every tool used slightly different math to put their right angle tracks onto grid, used different layers or annotations for documentation, etc.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #31 on: May 15, 2023, 07:59:51 am »
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"
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.
Forget about the user interface for a moment. (Especially since that is, to an extent, a matter of taste and familiarity.)

The issue is that LibreOffice's feature set isn't nearly as broad. It's more than enough for basic tasks, but it's simply missing many advanced things. So when people say it's "just as good", they're people who have yet to run into the absence of a feature. They don't consider that the other features are used by other people, and aren't just useless fluff.

(Also, they're much less disciplined about API stability. I worked at a software company whose product integrates with word processors. LibreOffice Writer was a constant problem, because the scripting API would often break with updates. Word's scripting and add-on APIs just worked. To this day they haven't even bothered trying to make an add-on for Writer.)

It's the same with the other examples I gave: the feature sets simply are not there. They may be adequate for casual users. (Including people who occasionally use them for professional work.) But they aren't sufficiently feature-rich for serious professional use. You need features that simply aren't there. You may be able to achieve the same end result, but it'll take more work in the less-capable program, so with time being money, professionals will pay for the more efficient tool. And that's precisely why professionals aren't going to switch to KiCad in droves anytime soon.
 

Offline tatel

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #32 on: May 15, 2023, 08:26:43 am »

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.)


Maybe off-topic since I don't know about Altium/Kicad, but I have to disagree. I don't really like LibreOffice, but I don't think MSOffice is any better. It was funny when the .docx became a thing and suddenly MSOffice users with older versions couldn't open .docx documents. I know many people that changed to LibreOffice just for that. Of course, these were individuals. Bureaucrats and people in any companies just asked their bosses to upgrade.

About Gimp/Photoshop, there's one thing Gimp never will do: to handle Pantone colors, because it's propietary. However if you work in pre-printing, you need to handle Pantone. Just imagine what will happen if say a big bank purchases a full page in your paper, then there's a disagreement about the color used in their corporate logo. Unless you can show evidence you used the correct Pantone reference, you are screwed big time. So, no, GIMP never will replace Photoshop in these habitats. But for any other uses, I would say yeah, GIMP is as good as Photoshop. Again, experienced users are the most reticent: where the fucking sharpen mask is in this crap?

Things are different when getting into the server environment, there are people that knows better than average users, and average users usually don't notice which software is running in the servers, so no problem. A very marked point was when, after London Stock Exchange CTO said loud that, even if the most important stock exchanges around the world had already changed to open source because, well, RedHat and realtime trading, London was to remain with MS because they got full MS support. Then, the day Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were going to the sharks, London Stock Exchange system crashed, and the full MS support couldn't make it to stand up again in time. So UK/european sharks didn't got their cut. AFAIK, that CTO got fired, London Stock Exchange has RedHat now, and I never heard of any other CTO saying they were to remain with MS no matter what.

I however agree with you in that time is money, and getting all the people proficient in a new software means a huge amount of money for a company, even if the features are there. Change will only happen when/if it makes sense crematistically.
 

Offline FaringdonTopic starter

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #33 on: May 15, 2023, 06:08:58 pm »
The fact that Altium is the most commonly used one in China says it all..the Chinese are the worlds best EE's now...so if they pick Altium, it must be the best.....the Chinese could have hacked up any layout software...but they picked Altium...thats a stunning endorsment for Altium.
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Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #34 on: May 15, 2023, 06:17:47 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"
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.
Forget about the user interface for a moment. (Especially since that is, to an extent, a matter of taste and familiarity.)

The issue is that LibreOffice's feature set isn't nearly as broad. It's more than enough for basic tasks, but it's simply missing many advanced things. So when people say it's "just as good", they're people who have yet to run into the absence of a feature. They don't consider that the other features are used by other people, and aren't just useless fluff.

(Also, they're much less disciplined about API stability. I worked at a software company whose product integrates with word processors. LibreOffice Writer was a constant problem, because the scripting API would often break with updates. Word's scripting and add-on APIs just worked. To this day they haven't even bothered trying to make an add-on for Writer.)

It's the same with the other examples I gave: the feature sets simply are not there. They may be adequate for casual users. (Including people who occasionally use them for professional work.) But they aren't sufficiently feature-rich for serious professional use. You need features that simply aren't there. You may be able to achieve the same end result, but it'll take more work in the less-capable program, so with time being money, professionals will pay for the more efficient tool. And that's precisely why professionals aren't going to switch to KiCad in droves anytime soon.
What features does MS Office have that you absolutely need?

I've found MS Office to be much worse than LO, when it comes to transferring files between versions. It would regularly break things more often. Pick your poison.

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.

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.
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.

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.
I don't see any evidence the Chinese copyright system will change and start to force Chinese companies to pay for Altium. Why would they? As I said it makes the government too much money in tax revenues. I bet they selectively enforce copyright. When it's a Chinese company, selling software to other countries, they definitely will enforce it, because it makes them money, but allowing people to use foreign software for free benefits them too much to stop.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #35 on: May 15, 2023, 07:31:18 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"
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.

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.


If someone con't convert from one program to another then I'd not want to employ them. Trying to find someone at work, the best candidate in the last batch we looked at listed Altium as a skill but did not list electronics, I said no good to me, I want a brain not a copy paste machine, don't have the time to tell him what to do all day.
 

Offline floobydust

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #36 on: May 15, 2023, 08:18:24 pm »
Converting from one program to another is never that mentally painful but I find most of the investment value of schematic/PCB CADD is instead in the libraries.
Many 100's of hours, checking for errors, adding DFM etc. So if you jump ship, $$$$ labour costs to reinvent the wheel. No other software I know of has exclusive, proprietary libraries as a leech parasite that clings to you sucking the cash out of you lol. You have been assimilated lol.

I tolerate a lot with freeware but do laugh and cry and swear when using GIMP compared to Photoshop. GIMP has a punishing UI, dare you try draw a circle with it lol. But it's still pretty powerful, well maintained and costs nothing.
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #37 on: May 15, 2023, 08:22:06 pm »
Quote
I don't see any evidence the Chinese copyright system will change and start to force Chinese companies to pay for Altium.

I don't have an opinion either way on that, but just having Altium as the de facto standard surely means anyone co-designing with the Chinese would either have to pirate or pay for their own copy.

Thinking that through, Altium would be a good match since it is backwards and forwards compatible in versions you could pirate and old version and your partners could be using the latest. If Kicad were in that boat then everyone would have to use the same version, and if you paid for the latest version (because, ethics) then your partners could be mighty pissed off at you.
 

Offline langwadt

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #38 on: May 15, 2023, 08:25:09 pm »
No other software I know of has exclusive, proprietary libraries as a leech parasite that clings to you sucking the cash out of you lol. You have been assimilated lol.

operation systems and microprocessors also tend to have a lock in effect
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #39 on: May 15, 2023, 08:43:39 pm »
Yes but if you know one program and have to use anther because say your new job uses it then I don't see the drama, if someone is going to make a fuss on their CV about which PCB program they are a master of then I'm not sure they will switch easily :)
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #40 on: May 15, 2023, 08:54:41 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"
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.
Forget about the user interface for a moment. (Especially since that is, to an extent, a matter of taste and familiarity.)

The issue is that LibreOffice's feature set isn't nearly as broad. It's more than enough for basic tasks, but it's simply missing many advanced things. So when people say it's "just as good", they're people who have yet to run into the absence of a feature. They don't consider that the other features are used by other people, and aren't just useless fluff.

(Also, they're much less disciplined about API stability. I worked at a software company whose product integrates with word processors. LibreOffice Writer was a constant problem, because the scripting API would often break with updates. Word's scripting and add-on APIs just worked. To this day they haven't even bothered trying to make an add-on for Writer.)

It's the same with the other examples I gave: the feature sets simply are not there. They may be adequate for casual users. (Including people who occasionally use them for professional work.) But they aren't sufficiently feature-rich for serious professional use. You need features that simply aren't there. You may be able to achieve the same end result, but it'll take more work in the less-capable program, so with time being money, professionals will pay for the more efficient tool. And that's precisely why professionals aren't going to switch to KiCad in droves anytime soon.
What features does MS Office have that you absolutely need?

I've found MS Office to be much worse than LO, when it comes to transferring files between versions. It would regularly break things more often. Pick your poison.


I didn’t say it wasn’t good enough for me so asking me for how it’s insufficient for me is not a fair question.

Even so, “absolutely need” is a different bar from “good enough”, which is basically how it’s presented.

Regardless, the situation is really simple: if it were “good enough” for most situations, it would be dominant in most environments. But it isn’t, so clearly it’s not good enough.

Ultimately, what annoys me is open source zealots who declare “it’s equivalent!” without understanding users’ needs. It’s dishonest, and that annoys me. A fair comparison acknowledges that the commercial product may have some real advantages, and the open source product may have some real disadvantages. But the fawning over the open source software is often religious, not based on actual experience in using it in a given situation.
 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #41 on: May 15, 2023, 08:59:47 pm »
Any country who has it for free, is massively advantaged in the world of electronics.
I am pretty certain you can get Altium licenses for next to nothing in certain parts of the world.....ive had people tell me this, who are from those places.
All i can say is "come on KICAD".
At least you can learn it for free....and use it for free.

If you are a student you will get access via university for the duration of your studies, the reason why is obvious, it's not very obvious as to why giving your work away would do you any good, would you work for free?

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.

Given the OP, my first question would be whether anyone would pay him for one of his SMPS designs.

My second question would be in what way for his tasks a free Altium would make someone  "... massively advantaged ...", given that KiCAD really is free. (Or is it merely a case of a bad workman blaming their tools?)

My third question would be whether the OP has returned to his traditional random questions eventually leading to "China is unfair" rants.
EDIT: reading more of the thread, I am completely unsurprised :(
« Last Edit: May 15, 2023, 09:07:30 pm by tggzzz »
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Offline floobydust

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #42 on: May 15, 2023, 09:15:53 pm »
Yes but if you know one program and have to use anther because say your new job uses it then I don't see the drama, if someone is going to make a fuss on their CV about which PCB program they are a master of then I'm not sure they will switch easily :)

It's not as trivial as you expect and who are you to say the switch is easy?

One engineering team I worked with got the command from corporate HQ to dump _____ and change over to Mentor. A political move.
Anyway, the handful of engineers struggled to get up to speed with the software and couldn't. It's terrible to "learn as you go", nothing intuitive, no on-line help etc.
Group meetings, placing calls to their Support line... we were told you also had to have taken their courses on the software.
"Oh, how much are these?" Well, it was thousands of dollars and of course corporate laughed and said no way, suck it up, it wasn't budgeted.

The entire engineering team got screwed by having different software dumped in their lap, no consideration or awareness of the learning curve or training required because asshole exec's never actually use the stuff.
The Project Schedule is expected to keep rollin' with no delays. Since product development is always a crisis, it was a great way to scuttle the team's productivity. Dumbest move I've ever seen. And to maintain old product designs you still needed licenses for the old software.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #43 on: May 15, 2023, 09:18:12 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"
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.
Forget about the user interface for a moment. (Especially since that is, to an extent, a matter of taste and familiarity.)

The issue is that LibreOffice's feature set isn't nearly as broad. It's more than enough for basic tasks, but it's simply missing many advanced things. So when people say it's "just as good", they're people who have yet to run into the absence of a feature. They don't consider that the other features are used by other people, and aren't just useless fluff.

(Also, they're much less disciplined about API stability. I worked at a software company whose product integrates with word processors. LibreOffice Writer was a constant problem, because the scripting API would often break with updates. Word's scripting and add-on APIs just worked. To this day they haven't even bothered trying to make an add-on for Writer.)

It's the same with the other examples I gave: the feature sets simply are not there. They may be adequate for casual users. (Including people who occasionally use them for professional work.) But they aren't sufficiently feature-rich for serious professional use. You need features that simply aren't there. You may be able to achieve the same end result, but it'll take more work in the less-capable program, so with time being money, professionals will pay for the more efficient tool. And that's precisely why professionals aren't going to switch to KiCad in droves anytime soon.
What features does MS Office have that you absolutely need?

I've found MS Office to be much worse than LO, when it comes to transferring files between versions. It would regularly break things more often. Pick your poison.


I didn’t say it wasn’t good enough for me so asking me for how it’s insufficient for me is not a fair question.

Even so, “absolutely need” is a different bar from “good enough”, which is basically how it’s presented.

Regardless, the situation is really simple: if it were “good enough” for most situations, it would be dominant in most environments. But it isn’t, so clearly it’s not good enough.

Ultimately, what annoys me is open source zealots who declare “it’s equivalent!” without understanding users’ needs. It’s dishonest, and that annoys me. A fair comparison acknowledges that the commercial product may have some real advantages, and the open source product may have some real disadvantages. But the fawning over the open source software is often religious, not based on actual experience in using it in a given situation.


I can tell you how shit MS excel is, scientists just gave up trying to stop excel changing the name of a gene into a date and just changed the name of the gene. I have also been constantly frustrated by how excel decides for you and destroys data. I use Libreoffice calc instead as it is quicker for doing the simple stuff as it does not get in the way all the time trying to be "helpful". I found a similar thing with word versus writer, I just got so fucking fed up with word changing what I had done as it decided what I was trying to do and was wrong all the time with no obvious way to stop it.

But I agree, just assuming that the open source stuff is better just because it's open source is not a good starting point. I find that either commercial developers do not use their own product or that they work for a stupid taskmaster that dictates also without using their own product. On the other hand I have tended to find that open source stuff is written by the people using it so they tend to nat make their lives and that of any other user an utter missery - there are exceptions of course and many free programs were clearly written to serve a niche so tight that you wonder why the developer bothered releasing the monstrosity that solved their particular problem onto the bewildered public.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #44 on: May 15, 2023, 09:20:47 pm »
Yes but if you know one program and have to use anther because say your new job uses it then I don't see the drama, if someone is going to make a fuss on their CV about which PCB program they are a master of then I'm not sure they will switch easily :)

It's not as trivial as you expect and who are you to say the switch is easy?

One engineering team I worked with got the command from corporate HQ to dump _____ and change over to Mentor. A political move.
Anyway, the handful of engineers struggled to get up to speed with the software and couldn't. It's terrible to "learn as you go", nothing intuitive, no on-line help etc.
Group meetings, placing calls to their Support line... we were told you also had to have taken their courses on the software.
"Oh, how much are these?" Well, it was thousands of dollars and of course corporate laughed and said no way, suck it up, it wasn't budgeted.

The entire engineering team got screwed by having different software dumped in their lap, no consideration or awareness of the learning curve or training required because asshole exec's never actually use the stuff.
The Project Schedule is expected to keep rollin' with no delays. Since product development is always a crisis, it was a great way to scuttle the team's productivity. Dumbest move I've ever seen. And to maintain old product designs you still needed licenses for the old software.

I'm not talking about changing over within the same organization or using something that apparently is hard work. I have used several and they are generally about the same. I'd not expect a new person to be just turning new boards out next day but if knowing one program is such a skill then uh. You got a problem.
 

Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #45 on: May 15, 2023, 09:37:02 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.
Out of curiosity, what pushed you away from Circuit Studio towards KiCad?

I bought Circuit Studio four years ago and there have been zero updates since then.
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Offline floobydust

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #46 on: May 15, 2023, 09:40:32 pm »
Yes but if you know one program and have to use anther because say your new job uses it then I don't see the drama, if someone is going to make a fuss on their CV about which PCB program they are a master of then I'm not sure they will switch easily :)

It's not as trivial as you expect and who are you to say the switch is easy?

One engineering team I worked with got the command from corporate HQ to dump _____ and change over to Mentor. A political move.
Anyway, the handful of engineers struggled to get up to speed with the software and couldn't. It's terrible to "learn as you go", nothing intuitive, no on-line help etc.
Group meetings, placing calls to their Support line... we were told you also had to have taken their courses on the software.
"Oh, how much are these?" Well, it was thousands of dollars and of course corporate laughed and said no way, suck it up, it wasn't budgeted.

The entire engineering team got screwed by having different software dumped in their lap, no consideration or awareness of the learning curve or training required because asshole exec's never actually use the stuff.
The Project Schedule is expected to keep rollin' with no delays. Since product development is always a crisis, it was a great way to scuttle the team's productivity. Dumbest move I've ever seen. And to maintain old product designs you still needed licenses for the old software.

I'm not talking about changing over within the same organization or using something that apparently is hard work. I have used several and they are generally about the same. I'd not expect a new person to be just turning new boards out next day but if knowing one program is such a skill then uh. You got a problem.

How are we measuring the difficulty changing over, learning the new software?
If it's taking a long time, surely it's due to low IQ? How many hours are you allotting for the new staff to get up to speed?

I saw many well-educated, intelligent EE's choke when expected to figure it out on their own. Because CADD software complexity is ever increasing and most has old legacy and clutzy UI to make it harder. No EE likes to be in a new job and starting from scratch with the tools. Or even hired in the first place - employers want the skills right off the bat.
Try sit down with AutoCAD or SolidWorks and tell me you can pick that up in a few days - no, you need the courses on it and months of experience.

Still thinking a software change is not difficult - it trashed morale, needed new libraries built, and months before people were fluent, and even then slow going.
We are assuming it's no big deal to change over and I say careful, it may no longer be trivial.
 

Offline HobGoblyn

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #47 on: May 15, 2023, 09:54:57 pm »
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.

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.
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.

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.

True story.

In my Atari ST days I was given a pirated copy of Steinbergs Pro 24, music midi recording software. This was in the 80s.  I was heavily into synthesisers, I loved it.

Steinberg then replaced Pro 24 with a completely revamped software called Cubase.  I bought it.

Over the years I have probably spent over £10k with Steinberg, this is just for me, at home, nothing to do with business.

Plenty of competition, Pro Tools seems to be the industry standard for recording studios etc, then there’s Logic Pro on the Mac.

But no matter how good those are, I’ve used Steinberg all my life and I’ve no reason to change now, all from that pirated software in the 80s
 

Offline tggzzz

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #48 on: May 15, 2023, 11:48:30 pm »
How are we measuring the difficulty changing over, learning the new software?
If it's taking a long time, surely it's due to low IQ? How many hours are you allotting for the new staff to get up to speed?

Not necessarily. Sometimes the tools are just peversely complicated

A few decades ago I saw people using Mentor Graphics schematic and layout software, in particular the amount of work they had to do to get anywhere, and how long it took to do anything graphic on high-end workstations. I was using the DOS variant of Orcad on a bog-standard PC, and decided I had better things to do with my brainpower (e.g. get the circuit designed and built).

The Mental Mentor Graphics users were rather sniffy, and refused to believe that you didn't need a mouse. They gasped when I showed them how fast and easily I could do complex graphic tasks using only keyboard commands. One I remember was moving a component while only disturbing the connections to the minimal useful extent. The command was BMBE<move with cursors><ESC> (BMBE was block mark begin end).

Sometimes tools make common tasks unnecessarily complicated, slow and error prone. (Think of C++ >:D )

Quote
No EE likes to be in a new job and starting from scratch with the tools. Or even hired in the first place - employers want the skills right off the bat.

I was always, by choice, in that position. Our job was to creating the concepts and implementations, and working out what tools were necessary were necessary.

Employers knew that and picked people that were capable and flexible - and a principal part of that is the ability to pick up skills as you go along.
« Last Edit: May 15, 2023, 11:52:56 pm by tggzzz »
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline MathWizard

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Re: Is Altium free anywhere?
« Reply #49 on: May 16, 2023, 11:10:36 am »
No Altium is not free, nor cheap. 2k$/yr for individual is a lot.

Just assume people borrow Altium from work, etc.
What makes it so good or useful,,, or niche, that a program is worth that much....and per year ??
 


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