Author Topic: The Autodesk Eagle edition  (Read 194150 times)

0 Members and 4 Guests are viewing this topic.

Offline richardlawson1489

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 124
  • Country: us
    • PCB Assembly
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #325 on: January 31, 2017, 11:54:02 am »
Hey, Is new eagle released? When it will?
 

Offline K6TR

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 57
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #326 on: February 01, 2017, 12:17:46 am »
It appears to me that Autodesk Brass have made the decision to write off the Old User Base and do the licensing scheme cut-over cold turkey. That's not a nice way to do business but that's business
 

Offline LabSpokane

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1899
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #327 on: February 01, 2017, 04:47:18 am »
Hey, Is new eagle released? When it will?

Version 8 is available for download here:  http://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/free-download

But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet. 
 

Offline Agent86

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 25
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #328 on: February 01, 2017, 05:48:34 am »
But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet.

Should I interpret that as a straight or a snarky comment?  I just looked and Dropbox Pro is a hundred bucks per year for a terabyte of space.  If EAGLE Standard gave me a terabyte of space (or the equivalent board size) for a hundred smacks a year, I might sign up for it.   :D

In all seriousness, with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools such as Jenkins commonly available, I'm surprised they haven't released an update yet.  We sometimes push out multiple releases per day over here, so if it was our product, it would have been a matter of editing a variable to change the number of layers, compile, test, deploy, celebrate.
 

Offline james_s

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 21611
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #329 on: February 01, 2017, 06:04:43 am »
But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet.

Should I interpret that as a straight or a snarky comment?  I just looked and Dropbox Pro is a hundred bucks per year for a terabyte of space.  If EAGLE Standard gave me a terabyte of space (or the equivalent board size) for a hundred smacks a year, I might sign up for it.   :D


Doesn't sound like such a bargain to me. For a hundred bucks I can buy more than a terabyte of space and I don't have to keep paying every year for that same space. If I want to access it elsewhere, I can put it on my server.
 

Offline LabSpokane

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1899
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #330 on: February 01, 2017, 08:14:44 am »
But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet.

Should I interpret that as a straight or a snarky comment?  I just looked and Dropbox Pro is a hundred bucks per year for a terabyte of space.  If EAGLE Standard gave me a terabyte of space (or the equivalent board size) for a hundred smacks a year, I might sign up for it.   :D

In all seriousness, with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools such as Jenkins commonly available, I'm surprised they haven't released an update yet.  We sometimes push out multiple releases per day over here, so if it was our product, it would have been a matter of editing a variable to change the number of layers, compile, test, deploy, celebrate.

That would be snark.

I don't see the virtue of daily software releases. KiCad people tout that as a feature. To me, daily releases are the definition of Hell. I'm not sure why anyone regards that as productive. 

Quarterly, with more frequent critical bug/security updates as absolutely necessary is as often as I ever want to update software and even that I would consider a nuisance.

Take six months. Test the work. Give me good software. I pay money. Rinse and repeat. It's all good.
 

Offline Wilksey

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1329
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #331 on: February 01, 2017, 11:25:09 am »
I use KiCAD, and I don't particularly care for the nightly builds, i'm on 4.0.5 stable and happy with it.
If you take all of the registration fluff out of Eagle V8 there is no real new features worth upgrading for at the moment, still happy using V.7 to maintain older projects.

One thing I have noticed, a rush of videos on YT of how to switch from Eagle to KiCAD...

Some people will stay some people will leave (reminds me of a recent referendum here in the UK), as Dave and many others have said, it's a pain in the arse to change CAD packages, so if some people are willing to change it must be worth it to them.
 

Offline donotdespisethesnake

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1093
  • Country: gb
  • Embedded stuff
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #332 on: February 01, 2017, 12:47:49 pm »
My tool for converting Eagle projects to Kicad is going pretty well, there is an alpha version (preview, not for real use yet) at https://github.com/bobc/eakit. Windows only at the moment, I'm looking at Linux version.

Out of all the forums I've looked at, I've seen a whole bunch of people complaining about the new Eagle licensing and are determined to switch from Eagle, there is a tiny handful (<5) who opine that subscription model is good, and they will continue using Eagle. I haven't seen *anyone* say that because of the new features/pricing of Eagle they are thinking of switching TO Eagle.

I have seen a tiny handful who say Autodesk have some good products and like what they do, so maybe there is some positive for Autodesk.
Bob
"All you said is just a bunch of opinions."
 

Offline madires

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7695
  • Country: de
  • A qualified hobbyist ;)
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #333 on: February 01, 2017, 01:11:38 pm »
My tool for converting Eagle projects to Kicad is going pretty well, there is an alpha version (preview, not for real use yet) at https://github.com/bobc/eakit. Windows only at the moment, I'm looking at Linux version.

No worries about finding beta testers ;)

Out of all the forums I've looked at, I've seen a whole bunch of people complaining about the new Eagle licensing and are determined to switch from Eagle, there is a tiny handful (<5) who opine that subscription model is good, and they will continue using Eagle. I haven't seen *anyone* say that because of the new features/pricing of Eagle they are thinking of switching TO Eagle.

It's dead, Jim - sorry - Bob.
 

Offline Agent86

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 25
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #334 on: February 01, 2017, 01:22:24 pm »
I don't see the virtue of daily software releases.

I'm not pushing for daily releases of EAGLE.  It's not appropriate for every piece of software.  However, I *am* wondering why it is taking Autodesk so long to release an updated version of EAGLE that can work with four layers...
 

Offline ebastler

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6202
  • Country: de
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #335 on: February 01, 2017, 01:28:57 pm »
I'm not pushing for daily releases of EAGLE.  It's not appropriate for every piece of software.  However, I *am* wondering why it is taking Autodesk so long to release an updated version of EAGLE that can work with four layers...

Maybe they hope that a few people (who are not following the forums and blogs) are desperate enough to upgrade to the pro version. Want to give them enough time to make a bad decision...  :-\
 

Offline james_s

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 21611
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #336 on: February 01, 2017, 04:04:51 pm »
The daily builds are for developers and people who want to play with the bleeding edge, I don't think anyone runs those doing actual work. I usually only upgrade mine every couple years or so depending on what new features there are, and I only upgrade to stable releases.
 

Offline jgarc063

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 83
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #337 on: February 01, 2017, 04:59:19 pm »
Hi Guys,

Next update is due out end of this week early next. I agree with other posters, nightly builds are not a good idea for production software. The goal right now is to squash bugs and make refinements to the new features. From here you'll see that we will be releasing updates far more frequently than we ever did as Cadsoft and instead of waiting for a major release for major features, these will be released throughout the year.

Hope this clarifies things.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia
Autodesk Support
 

Offline Bassman59

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2501
  • Country: us
  • Yes, I do this for a living
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #338 on: February 01, 2017, 05:04:28 pm »
I don't see the virtue of daily software releases. KiCad people tout that as a feature.

That's not true -- the Kicad "people" encourage users to stick with the stable release (4.0.5 as of this writing).  The nightly builds are for developers, testers and those users who are willing to trade stability for access to the latest features (and there are quite a few!). I've been using a recent daily build and it's stable.

The largest issue with using nightly builds is that if they make changes to the file formats to add a new feature, those files can't be opened in the older stable version. While a reasonable person would have proper project backups, or even keep designs in a source code control repository, there is the occasional "I saved my project using the nightly build and now I can't open the file in the stable! KICAD SUCKS!"

Things with Kicad will get very interesting for nightly-build users once the library tables concept now used with pcbnew gets turned on for eeschema.
 

Offline donotdespisethesnake

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1093
  • Country: gb
  • Embedded stuff
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #339 on: February 01, 2017, 05:16:33 pm »
I don't see the virtue of daily software releases. KiCad people tout that as a feature.

Yeah, I have to call "citation needed" on that one. It's NOT a daily release. There is a daily *test build*, obviously there are stable releases and no one is forced to use test builds.

Basically you are just spreading BS/FUD, I would leave that to people who are paid to.

"Kicad people" is a pretty meaningless phrase anyway, it's not like KiCad has a marketing division!
Bob
"All you said is just a bunch of opinions."
 
The following users thanked this post: nazcalines, LA7SJA, iaeen

Offline iaeen

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 65
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #340 on: February 01, 2017, 11:39:36 pm »
But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet.

Should I interpret that as a straight or a snarky comment?  I just looked and Dropbox Pro is a hundred bucks per year for a terabyte of space.  If EAGLE Standard gave me a terabyte of space (or the equivalent board size) for a hundred smacks a year, I might sign up for it.   :D

In all seriousness, with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools such as Jenkins commonly available, I'm surprised they haven't released an update yet.  We sometimes push out multiple releases per day over here, so if it was our product, it would have been a matter of editing a variable to change the number of layers, compile, test, deploy, celebrate.

That would be snark.

I don't see the virtue of daily software releases. KiCad people tout that as a feature. To me, daily releases are the definition of Hell. I'm not sure why anyone regards that as productive. 

Quarterly, with more frequent critical bug/security updates as absolutely necessary is as often as I ever want to update software and even that I would consider a nuisance.

Take six months. Test the work. Give me good software. I pay money. Rinse and repeat. It's all good.

In no version of reality is 6 months an acceptable timeframe to get the promised 4 layer functionality into the standard edition.

The company I work for sells its software to the medical industry. We have an ultra conservative development process because bugs in our product can kill people. Still, we would be out of business by now if it took 6 months to make simple changes when our customers needed it.
 

Offline LabSpokane

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1899
  • Country: us
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #341 on: February 01, 2017, 11:51:51 pm »
But it costs the same as Dropbox Pro and that's far too much from what I read on the internet.

Should I interpret that as a straight or a snarky comment?  I just looked and Dropbox Pro is a hundred bucks per year for a terabyte of space.  If EAGLE Standard gave me a terabyte of space (or the equivalent board size) for a hundred smacks a year, I might sign up for it.   :D

In all seriousness, with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools such as Jenkins commonly available, I'm surprised they haven't released an update yet.  We sometimes push out multiple releases per day over here, so if it was our product, it would have been a matter of editing a variable to change the number of layers, compile, test, deploy, celebrate.

That would be snark.

I don't see the virtue of daily software releases. KiCad people tout that as a feature. To me, daily releases are the definition of Hell. I'm not sure why anyone regards that as productive. 

Quarterly, with more frequent critical bug/security updates as absolutely necessary is as often as I ever want to update software and even that I would consider a nuisance.

Take six months. Test the work. Give me good software. I pay money. Rinse and repeat. It's all good.

In no version of reality is 6 months an acceptable timeframe to get the promised 4 layer functionality into the standard edition.

The company I work for sells its software to the medical industry. We have an ultra conservative development process because bugs in our product can kill people. Still, we would be out of business by now if it took 6 months to make simple changes when our customers needed it.

[autoshill]Since you regard me as an Autodesk employee, I am pleased to announce that the 4 layer update will be released 18 months from now, and we will be selectively charging users for it based on the obnoxiousness of the protests over the release date.

Or maybe we'll do it next week. Or not. We really just do this stuff to make you angry and write nasty comments. [/autoshill]
« Last Edit: February 02, 2017, 06:14:24 am by LabSpokane »
 

Offline hlavac

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 536
  • Country: cz
So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #342 on: February 02, 2017, 09:01:26 am »
What is Autodesk really trying to do here?
Eagle is not in the same situation as Fusion 360, which is relatively friendly to hobbyists and startups, and lives off professional users.
Hobbyists and startups may be Eagle's primary users! They will be the primary source of revenue!

The point of users buying upgrades when they want is to ensure the work in the upgrade is spent on something the users actually want. If they dont like what they see, they can skip the upgrade.
The subscription model is designed to take away the users control of what the money they pay go toward and force them to pay anyway.

Now the constant updates model they are using on Fusion 360 and will probably be used on Eagle because of the need to give something to users for the monthly subscription is another evil thing that brings instability, bugs & data corruption.

And then there is the cloud stuff.

Are they looking to make the life of hobbyists more miserable?
Good enough is the enemy of the best.
 

Online mikeselectricstuff

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 13694
  • Country: gb
    • Mike's Electric Stuff
Re: The Autodesk Eagle edition
« Reply #343 on: February 02, 2017, 09:10:52 am »
The motivations are obvious - they are big in mechanical design, most mechanical things have electronics in them, so they want to move to be in a "1-stop shop" position. I'd expect to see some integration with Fusion360.
 
Youtube channel:Taking wierd stuff apart. Very apart.
Mike's Electric Stuff: High voltage, vintage electronics etc.
Day Job: Mostly LEDs
 

Offline donotdespisethesnake

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1093
  • Country: gb
  • Embedded stuff
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #344 on: February 02, 2017, 12:39:43 pm »
Are they looking to make the life of hobbyists more miserable?
No, they're not looking to do it. Hobbyists will be collateral damage.

I think that is almost certainly true. CadSoft were a tiny outfit, they probably regarded being hobbyist friendly and word of mouth recommendations as a useful way to grow sales. But if you ask the product or marketing manager at a large corporate, hobbyists are not even on their radar. They are looking at revenue figures of $millions, they have zero interest in anything else. Marketing is done through very market specific channels, eg. trade shows which hobbyists are not even aware of. Possibly PR departments might pick up on hobby use. But "also used by hobbyists" is actually not a great sales angle if you are trying to sell a professional package into large organisations.

The background to this is US tax policy. US corporate tax is 40% but not on profits outside US. So US companies funnel profits into offshore companies and build big cash reserves, rather than bring it back to US and pay 40% tax. Autodesk profit is around $250 million, cash reserves in the region of $2 billion. If they paid $30 million for Eagle, that is peanuts. They still have the option of buying another product, or developing their own. Eagle was cheap and available to buy, so maybe a no-brainer. Autodesk also bought a string of other companies, such as Tinkercad. They also have 123D circuits, which is a cloud based ECAD.

All this makes perfect sense from the point of view of Autodesk, and the direction of the market in general. Companies are getting used to subscription model for Microsoft products, cloud services etc, and the bean counters even prefer it. Unfortunately, hobbyists and those one-man band companies don't enter into the calculations, they will have to make do with crumbs off the table.
Bob
"All you said is just a bunch of opinions."
 

Offline ebastler

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6202
  • Country: de
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #345 on: February 02, 2017, 12:53:49 pm »
Autodesk profit is around $250 million, cash reserves in the region of $2 billion. If they paid $30 million for Eagle, that is peanuts. They still have the option of buying another product, or developing their own. Eagle was cheap and available to buy, so maybe a no-brainer.

Still, they must have built a financial model to prove to themselves that the deal was worthwhile. I wonder what that looks like (but will, of course, never know...). The $30M price tag is not known, but was reverse-engineered from their overall balance sheet if I recall correctly -- or is there a definitive source?
 

Offline madires

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7695
  • Country: de
  • A qualified hobbyist ;)
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #346 on: February 02, 2017, 02:05:11 pm »
I think that is almost certainly true. CadSoft were a tiny outfit, they probably regarded being hobbyist friendly and word of mouth recommendations as a useful way to grow sales. But if you ask the product or marketing manager at a large corporate, hobbyists are not even on their radar. They are looking at revenue figures of $millions, they have zero interest in anything else. Marketing is done through very market specific channels, eg. trade shows which hobbyists are not even aware of. Possibly PR departments might pick up on hobby use. But "also used by hobbyists" is actually not a great sales angle if you are trying to sell a professional package into large organisations.

Good and valid point! But what Autodesk have missed is that Eagle is a semi-professional tool at best. Trying to sell a hobbyist/maker package to corporations might be not a good idea either.
 

Offline madires

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7695
  • Country: de
  • A qualified hobbyist ;)
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #347 on: February 02, 2017, 02:14:19 pm »
Still, they must have built a financial model to prove to themselves that the deal was worthwhile. I wonder what that looks like (but will, of course, never know...).

It might not be Eagle as a product necessarily. It could also be the IP which they can integrate into one of their other software packages. Possibly the idea is drop Eagle anyway and to create a new professional EDA tool. In that case Eagle will be kept alive for a while, and later on customers are pushed to upgrade to the new EDA tool. Anyway, I think we can safely assume that Eagle, as we know it, is dead.
 

Offline ebastler

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6202
  • Country: de
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #348 on: February 02, 2017, 02:40:28 pm »
I think that is almost certainly true. CadSoft were a tiny outfit, they probably regarded being hobbyist friendly and word of mouth recommendations as a useful way to grow sales. But if you ask the product or marketing manager at a large corporate, hobbyists are not even on their radar. They are looking at revenue figures of $millions, they have zero interest in anything else. Marketing is done through very market specific channels, eg. trade shows which hobbyists are not even aware of. Possibly PR departments might pick up on hobby use. But "also used by hobbyists" is actually not a great sales angle if you are trying to sell a professional package into large organisations.

Good and valid point! But what Autodesk have missed is that Eagle is a semi-professional tool at best. Trying to sell a hobbyist/maker package to corporations might be not a good idea either.

I've been wondering for a while, as this thread evolved:
Does anyone know about data showing what Eagle's user base actually looks like?

Cadsoft's process for ordering a hobbyist/maker license was so peculiar that I always felt they must be regarding hobbyists as a nuisance, rather than their core customers.  At least here in Germany, you had to print, sign, and either scan or snail-mail a declaration that you would only use Eagle for non-commercial purposes...   :-\
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 5170
  • Country: us
Re: So what could be the Autodesk's real motivations behind buying Eagle?
« Reply #349 on: February 02, 2017, 02:49:49 pm »
I think that is almost certainly true. CadSoft were a tiny outfit, they probably regarded being hobbyist friendly and word of mouth recommendations as a useful way to grow sales. But if you ask the product or marketing manager at a large corporate, hobbyists are not even on their radar. They are looking at revenue figures of $millions, they have zero interest in anything else. Marketing is done through very market specific channels, eg. trade shows which hobbyists are not even aware of. Possibly PR departments might pick up on hobby use. But "also used by hobbyists" is actually not a great sales angle if you are trying to sell a professional package into large organisations.

Good and valid point! But what Autodesk have missed is that Eagle is a semi-professional tool at best. Trying to sell a hobbyist/maker package to corporations might be not a good idea either.

I've been wondering for a while, as this thread evolved:
Does anyone know about data showing what Eagle's user base actually looks like?

Cadsoft's process for ordering a hobbyist/maker license was so peculiar that I always felt they must be regarding hobbyists as a nuisance, rather than their core customers.  At least here in Germany, you had to print, sign, and either scan or snail-mail a declaration that you would only use Eagle for non-commercial purposes...   :-\

I have no idea what the actual user base looks like, but by my recollection that nuisance in buying a hobbyist license started around version 4.0.  Either because they started setting their sights on a more professional market, or just because they felt that their revenue stream was being damaged by people "cheating".  Or maybe that is when they added a lawyer to the staff.
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf