Altium Just Lost a Sale

[knapik]

Maybe not too heavily myself. My university does have Altium licenses for some computers and does at least somewhat teach us how to use it.
Starting with this year however, my partner was asking for a way to get a way to use the software at home for our university project and I believe the response he received was just a link to buy a student use license, which I do believe are at least comparatively much cheaper than a full use license. However, I'm quite poor and was already comfortable with KiCAD, so I didn't see the point in continuing.

[Simon]

yes lots of companies have student licence agreements. If CS was better they could just point you at that but currently it's a joke and it deliberately can't open the new PCB file formats. So while Daves µCurrent is open source the altium files he provides are only semi readable. James was kind enough to convert it for me not that I had any use for it, it was simply an exercise in how compatible are AD and CS - not very from a production point of view.

We have this problem at work where siemens the bastards tat make solid edge will not open files produced by a newer version and i am quite certain it is an artificial limit and causes havoc at work as the whole office has to upgrade together so that they can open a project currently being worked on by someone else.

[voltsandjolts]

So you prefer to keep using cracked Altium rather than CS because you installed CS (for about 5 mins) and got annoyed that CS shortcuts were different to what you expected. Thanks for your very professional in-depth review. I wish your lab the very best of luck.

I have a commercial copy under my name with active sub, but some of my coworkers use cracked copy.
The university only offers one legit seat of AD, and it is AD6 back to stone age, and we have somewhere 500 students in the dept. of ECE.
Some research groups or students may shell out some money for a student license, but some others will only buy software if the funding source pays for that.
Unfortunately, our department doesn't allow general purchasing orders to contain software orders, and all software orders must go through ECE IT department, which means piles of paperwork.

So at the end of the day, many students just use cracked AD in the lab. Professors don't care, since they don't do CAD works at all. They only care the boards delivered on time, they won't be bothered with Gerber and PCBDOC.
Please keep in mind that even a student license is purchased, it's still technically piracy, because student license doesn't allow you to do paid jobs, including grant money in university.
PhD students here are paid $2000 per month, and $1700 after tax, from which $1000 is the bare minimum to survive. We can't possibly afford a $10k software.
We do have unlimited Allegro license, but nobody likes to remote login to a Linux server to use a software that looks very Unix-y form the 90s.

The only reason I was able to afford a commercial copy of AD is because I like this thing too much (being a pirate user for years since Protel age), that I used my car fund to buy AD, and I spent the rest on a 20 year old Accord.
Unfortunately, I'm the only person I know in real life that uses a genuine copy of AD, despite more than half of the boards from our dept. are laid out using AD.
Like it or not, this is university.

Well, good on you, Blueskull for ponying-up the $$$ for AD...but your employer should be providing modern tools to help your lab team do their research. North Carolina State University has over 9,000 people on the pay roll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_State_University), has currently raised $1300 millions endowment (https://campaign.ncsu.edu//) and in 2016 alone spent $490 millions on research expenditure (https://controller.ofa.ncsu.edu/financial-reports/). At least try getting a quote for some network academic licenses of AD.

[ahbushnell]

So you prefer to keep using cracked Altium rather than CS because you installed CS (for about 5 mins) and got annoyed that CS shortcuts were different to what you expected. Thanks for your very professional in-depth review. I wish your lab the very best of luck.

I have a commercial copy under my name with active sub, but some of my coworkers use cracked copy.
The university only offers one legit seat of AD, and it is AD6 back to stone age, and we have somewhere 500 students in the dept. of ECE.
Some research groups or students may shell out some money for a student license, but some others will only buy software if the funding source pays for that.
Unfortunately, our department doesn't allow general purchasing orders to contain software orders, and all software orders must go through ECE IT department, which means piles of paperwork.

So at the end of the day, many students just use cracked AD in the lab. Professors don't care, since they don't do CAD works at all. They only care the boards delivered on time, they won't be bothered with Gerber and PCBDOC.
Please keep in mind that even a student license is purchased, it's still technically piracy, because student license doesn't allow you to do paid jobs, including grant money in university.
PhD students here are paid $2000 per month, and $1700 after tax, from which $1000 is the bare minimum to survive. We can't possibly afford a $10k software.
We do have unlimited Allegro license, but nobody likes to remote login to a Linux server to use a software that looks very Unix-y form the 90s.

The only reason I was able to afford a commercial copy of AD is because I like this thing too much (being a pirate user for years since Protel age), that I used my car fund to buy AD, and I spent the rest on a 20 year old Accord.
Unfortunately, I'm the only person I know in real life that uses a genuine copy of AD, despite more than half of the boards from our dept. are laid out using AD.
Like it or not, this is university.

So your university condones theft? 

[Spark-Doctor]

CircuitStudio support is via Element14, however *some* licensing issues or issues with Vault sign in may require them to involve Altium to solve, but normally this would be via Element14 rather than Altium directly, to avoid these sorts of communication problems.

Hi James and thanks for replying. I can understand what you are saying but why, after downloading the trial am i sent emails directly from Altium support? Surely Elerment14 should be sending out the emails and then i would know who to contact in the first place to get help. Instead, i receive an email directly from Altium saying to contact them if there is a problem. I ask and i don't get a reply. That's not customer service.

[Simon]

For the same reason 9 months into your first CS year they contact you trying to sell AD.....