The end has come

[hanakp]

So June 7, 2026 has come and went and desktop Eagle went with it, I got the final screen today. But curiously, I can use the program normally, even though Control Panel lists me as Offline. Of course online Library Manager doesn't work, but otherwise there are no limitations to PCB size or copper layers. Maybe Autodesk did the right thing after all and permanently unlocked existing installations of Eagle?

[gsm2k]

After the 30 day offline period you will be locked out unfortunately.

But thankfully Autodesk's license handler is so sloppily tacked on that it is trivial to bypass. 😇

[Renate]

Gee, that was nice of them.
Take over Eagle, then abandon it.
Are they going to release it as free software now?

[eliocor]

I found this on the web (v9.6.2):

Code: [Select]

- go to installation directory
- Find "libeay32.dll" and change name to "libeay32.bak"
P.S.: not being an Eagle user, I could not verify it!

[KE5FX]

7.7.0 still runs just fine, thanks.   

If giving money to Autodesk is the answer, you asked the wrong question.

[Smokey]

Gee, that was nice of them.
Take over Eagle, then abandon it.
Are they going to release it as free software now?

Isn't Fusion PCB just eagle?  That's hardly abandoned. 

[gsm2k]

I found this on the web (v9.6.2):

Code: [Select]

- go to installation directory
- Find "libeay32.dll" and change name to "libeay32.bak"
P.S.: not being an Eagle user, I could not verify it!

libeay32.dll is just a part of the OpenSSL library. Removing or renaming it will just cause windows to look for it elsewhere or cause eagle.exe to crash if it isn't found.

[Renate]

As far as I can tell, Fusion is heavily cloud, at least they say "cloud" an awfully lot.

[eliocor]

@gsm2k : have you tried it? There are some Eagle users which say it is working....
As I previously wrote, I have not tested it.

BTW, it is very easy to revert to the original situation.

[gsm2k]

@gsm2k : have you tried it? There are some Eagle users which say it is working....
As I previously wrote, I have not tested it.

BTW, it is very easy to revert to the original situation.

The entire licence handling and authorization logic is contained within the eagle binaries so there's no way it could work.. Unless you're replacing it with a wrapper/proxy dll to inject custom code.

[Kjelt]

Wait new for me, will old v6 eagle be touched by this? Or only when I try to reinstall and license on a new system?
When I bought it, it was part of the contract that it was pay once, use lifetime, they can not single sidedly change that.

[Karel]

Wait new for me, will old v6 eagle be touched by this? Or only when I try to reinstall and license on a new system?
When I bought it, it was part of the contract that it was pay once, use lifetime, they can not single sidedly change that.

No, this started to happen with V8 and later. Up to and including V7, you can always reinstall using your license code  and key.

[macegr]

So many people scoffed at me and tried to convince me "but recurring revenue actually makes the product less likely to go away" etc when I pointed out that, from the customer perspective, the only thing Autodesk adds to software to make it subscription-based is a remote kill switch. My choice of language was just too hyperbolic and alarmist for them.

[KE5FX]

So many people scoffed at me and tried to convince me "but recurring revenue actually makes the product less likely to go away" etc when I pointed out that, from the customer perspective, the only thing Autodesk adds to software to make it subscription-based is a remote kill switch. My choice of language was just too hyperbolic and alarmist for them.

Also no shortage of astroturfing and professional glad-handing from Autodesk.

[Karel]

It's very fortunate that there's now a good (and even better) alternative (KiCad).

[Doctorandus_P]

The end of eagle came the day it was bought by autodesk. autodesk has a long history of buying up other software and destroying it. It's their business model.

There was a significant peak in donations to KiCad when autodesk bought eagle. Apparently a lot of people already predicted what was coming.

I never used eagle myself. Some 15 years ago I did an evaluation, did not like eagle, then discovered KiCad, and stuck with it. Never regretted it.

From what I've read about people switching from eagle to KiCad, many wish they had did it years earlier. KiCad (most certainly now) has a much richer feature set then eagle ever had. Some people are having some difficulty with KiCad because it works "differently" from eagle. And there are also a few complaints on the KiCad forum about some feature that was in eagle but not in KiCad, and those users liked that feature a lot.

The eagle importer for KiCad also works quite good, and it's taken seriously. Just yesterday, KiCad V10.0.4 was released, (with over 200 bug fixes) and there are 15 bug fixes for the eagle importer. KiCad is under very active development. Each point release (every 4 to 6 weeks on average) gets around 100 bug fixes, and each year a new mayor release, with 50 or more new features.

[Renate]

I still use Eagle 7.7
Ok, I'm a roll-your-own type.
I can get a halfway decent layout program.
I can generate my own libraries in XML.
I looked at KiCad and saw the file format and said that it was nothing for me.
AutoDesk is infamous for bloated file formats.
YMMV

OTOH, JLCPCB still wants to plate physical holes near copper.
When I say "hole", I mean hole.

[KE5FX]

The combination of XML and bulletproof back annotation mean that EAGLE isn't going away around here.  Not anytime soon, anyway.

[hanakp]

Welp, @gsm2k was right, Eagle dropped to Free license after 30 days. I wonder if it's even possible to do the initial license activation after fresh install, or you'll be forced to use Fusion to merely view your old designs on new machines...

[macegr]

I used to use commercial software all the time. There's just something about the functionality of a piece of software that was actually someone's full time job to develop, and open-source software typically plays catch-up. I was happy to pay for software that did what I needed it to do. I paid thousands for Eagle licenses specifically.

When most software migrated to subscription models, a lot of people tried to apologize for them, trying to make us sympathize with the plight of the billion-dollar-a-year company that had to depend on sporadic software purchases instead of a steady monthly revenue. They claimed this would fuel innovation and constant improvement.

What I actually observed was a general decline in software quality across the industry. Developers no longer had to innovate to spark a wave of new purchases for upgraded functionality; all they needed to do was push some small feature every so often. Or not even that, because the money would keep rolling in as long as customers wanted to access their projects.

This is when I began switching to open-source software whenever possible. And not just open-source, but ones that aren't VC-backed with the inevitable rug-pull after years of accepting community contributions. I look for actual open-source software.

It can be a struggle, because in many cases open-source software doesn't do everything the commercial options can. FreeCAD for example, I use it wherever possible but if I need to make a complex assembly I at minimum have to go to Onshape (yes, a web-based CAD often performs better than native FreeCAD executable).

But every time I successfully complete a project with only open-source tools, I get such a wave of relief. I don't have to worry about losing access to that software and my own work, forever. And software like KiCAD is rapidly closing the gap in functionality...while staying simple enough to learn quickly, and not slow down simple projects like enterprise software does.

[alex_]

Eagle 7.7 was released in Q4 of 2016 and the was last non Autodesk version. Farnell owned it at the time, but was not that much involved in the dev.
I have purchased countless licenses since v4 at my various places of work, and then for my own. Good old perpetual licenses, worked offline, no licensing crap.

Looking at the competitors, Eagle was and still is miles ahead. Lightweight and fast. No bugs, no lag. You control all your files, your libraries, your IP.
The open file format and the ULP scripting have no limit. Yes some functions are missing in the ULP and won't get added sadly, but you can always use an external script directly on your files.
I could not remember all the crazy stunts I have done with these files, from architectural designs, IC layout, fully automatic design generation plus all the usual day to day scripting.

Every time I open Altium and Kicad (fortunately the others are long gone) it's just pain and suffering. Why so heavy, so many clicks for a simple change ? Why do I need to download GiBs of installer because my version is suddenly incompatible, again ?
And most important, why no live back and forth annotation ? Good luck optimizing the layout of a large MCU or FPGA without.

Was Eagle 7.7 the best tool out of the box ? No. Never. But for any power-user that took the time to tune it (menus, colors, scripts, ...) it is perfect. I don't plan to change eCAD anytime soon.

Now if someone would manage (with LLM?) to extract some source code from the 7.7 binaries I am all in to contribute a few features for a 7.8

[Kjelt]

Yes that would have been a last great gesture from Cadsoft to publish the source code to the open source community to be further developed by enthousiasts.

[Doctorandus_P]

Yes that would have been a last great gesture from Cadsoft to publish the source code to the open source community to be further developed by enthousiasts.

Cadsoft got bought by autodesk for around USD 25M (according to some unverified ai thing). Most was probably for the customer base, and some for the name, but the source code was part of the package.

[hanakp]

I first learned Eagle 2.6 (yes, under MS DOS) in my vocational school in 1996 and I'd been using it continuously since then. After 30 years, it was particularly painful to see it go. But unlike other popular historical PCB EDAs (see P-CAD), it's not completely dead. Sure, the official successor Autodesk Fusion Electronics is a cloud-based garbage, but it's something. And Altium and KiCad have almost perfect Eagle importers now. And if all else fails, there are cracked versions of Eagle floating around, even though their quality varies.

Personally, I decided to switch to KiCad. As mentioned by @alex_, it's much less user-friendly SW, but  current development team has improved its usability tremendously over the last few years. Sure, its Orcad-like schematic editor is still quite hostile, since a bad mouse move can create unwanted shorts with zero warning (Altium 15 was even worse). That really pissed me off, so I paid KiCad developers to at least add visual indication it's about to happen.

KiCad's SCH-PCB sync is a real pain, in fact, it's the worst and most complicated implementation I've seen in any PCB EDA. And unfortunately the sync menu (F8) has been getting yet more and more complicated with every major version. I paid them to fix the most egregious problem with it, but it will work only if the user enables in settings. I actually asked them about Eagle-like realtime PCB sync -- it's not anywhere on their future development roadmap, but it would be doable. It would require a lot of work though, so they gave a price quote for which you could buy a used car...

I'm also currently negotiating to sponsor development of Block Drag function in PCB editor which will work almost like Move in Eagle. Frankly I find it incomprehensible that something so basic could have been missing in KiCad for so long. It will be the most expensive feature I'd sponsored yet, but on the other hand, it's a few years of Autodesk Fusion subscription price. Except all KiCad users will get it and can use it in perpetuity. Still, if you wanted to pitch in some money for these features, let me know!

[macegr]

Imagine trying to contact Autodesk with the cash an individual person can offer, asking for specific software development tasks. KiCad might not be all the way done yet, but software companies by trying to wring us dry are helping us discover better ways of getting our work done without them.