General > General Technical Chat

Is Altium free anywhere?

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Sal Ammoniac:

--- 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 ---

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

floobydust:

--- Quote from: Simon on May 15, 2023, 09:20:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: floobydust on May 15, 2023, 09:15:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: Simon 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 :)

--- End quote ---

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.

--- End quote ---

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.

--- End quote ---

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.

HobGoblyn:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 15, 2023, 02:41:25 am ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

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

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: floobydust on May 15, 2023, 09:40:32 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?

--- End quote ---

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.

--- End quote ---

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.

MathWizard:

--- Quote from: hans on May 14, 2023, 08:43:52 am ---No Altium is not free, nor cheap. 2k$/yr for individual is a lot.

Just assume people borrow Altium from work, etc.

--- End quote ---
What makes it so good or useful,,, or niche, that a program is worth that much....and per year ??

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