As for the sharecropper, get serious. With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest. The money from users will now be closely coupled to the corporation's performance. It's a beautiful thing. And a powerful thing. You now get a powerful voice.What a complete load of nonsense!
Previously if they "got out of line", you simply didn't buy that version or any version thereafter until the problem was fixed. They still didn't get your money same as canceling a subscription, and you kept going with your current license.
Now, to exercise your "powerful voice" you are forced to give up your dev tool plus access to all your projects which are saved in Eagle's proprietary format!Do you refer to the super-duper-double-secret file, proprietary format that OSHPARK can read natively? The same proprietary, double-encrypted format that imports directly into Altium? Oh, then there are the secret, proprietary scripts that convert Eagle into that great EU-subsidized ... I mean Free! Free! ... KiCad.
Walking away from Eagle is readily done.
Walking away form a dev tool is never easy.
It:
a) Takes time
b) Takes effort
Iaeen has a very good point. With the previous perpetual license you can simply protest any company changes etc by not buying the new version that comes out. And you pay zero penalty for doing that.
With the new subscription model if you want to protest then your tool stops working instantly you stop paying! You can't just continue on with business as usual using the tool like you can with a perpetual license.
The fundamental problem is that in a saturated market a licensing model is the only way for a company to continue to make make money. And most software markets are saturated these days. That is bad for the software companies and bad for customers.
The tool stops when your subscription period expires, not immediately upon cancellation. There's also nothing to say one couldn't drop Eagle and do a two or three month transition to another platform.
As for the sharecropper, get serious. With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest. The money from users will now be closely coupled to the corporation's performance. It's a beautiful thing. And a powerful thing. You now get a powerful voice.
What a complete load of nonsense!
Previously if they "got out of line", you simply didn't buy that version or any version thereafter until the problem was fixed. They still didn't get your money same as canceling a subscription, and you kept going with your current license.
Now, to exercise your "powerful voice" you are forced to give up your dev tool plus access to all your projects which are saved in Eagle's proprietary format!
Do you refer to the super-duper-double-secret file, proprietary format that OSHPARK can read natively? The same proprietary, double-encrypted format that imports directly into Altium? Oh, then there are the secret, proprietary scripts that convert Eagle into that great EU-subsidized ... I mean Free! Free! ... KiCad.
Walking away from Eagle is readily done. But that Altium license starts at a grand. All up front.
Yeah, okay. Maybe you can still get at your files. That doesn't make your gushing over this any less absurd.
This has nothing to do with empowering users. It is, in fact, the exact opposite.
The tool stops when your subscription period expires, not immediately upon cancellation. There's also nothing to say one couldn't drop Eagle and do a two or three month transition to another platform.
Honestly, all the vitriol from the maker community at every, single software platform they interact with ought to be a lesson to software companies everywhere to stop bothering to the maker/hobbiest market at all. There is no pleasing this user group. I'd honestly advise Autodesk just abandon the low-end options and focus on the unserved market: small business and startups for whom an efficient tool for $65/mo is a no brainer. At least one of them might actually say, "thank you."
The tool stops when your subscription period expires, not immediately upon cancellation. There's also nothing to say one couldn't drop Eagle and do a two or three month transition to another platform.
But the point is that does not lesson the pain of doing so. So it is not nearly as good a tool to "hold their feet to the fire" with compared to a perpetual license. This is a demonstrable fact.
I'd much rather have my perpetual license and say to them:
"Ok, prove to me your new version is worth the upgrade, I've got nothing to lose, I can keep on using my old version forever, no skin off my nose"
than have to threaten them and say:
"I'm going to stop my subscription move to another tool if your next version isn't good".
If you say the later they are going to just laugh in your face and say to themselves "go right ahead, we dare you, we know how much pain it is to change".
I worked at a PCB tool company and I know that's the effective truth.
It's the pain of changing tools that let Altium get away with inflicting countless horrible changes on their customer base over a 15 year period.
With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest.
With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest.
I'm fairly sure you haven't thought this through quite as far as you claim you have.
With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest.
I'm fairly sure you haven't thought this through quite as far as you claim you have.
I've thought this through enough to really rile you guys up.
With month to month licensing, if Autodesk gets out of line, folks can immediately shut down their subscription in protest.
I'm fairly sure you haven't thought this through quite as far as you claim you have.
I've thought this through enough to really rile you guys up.
No you haven't. What you are saying is the opposite of the reality of the situation. If you're just here to then that's kinda sad, but ok.
Listen, I'm really pleased to see Eagle live on and improve.
You don't like counter-points, and that's fine.
I hereby return this thread to you all for continued anger, angst, and outrage about the actions of a company that makes software a lot of folks actually like.
Listen, I'm really pleased to see Eagle live on and improve. You don't like counter-points, and that's fine. I hereby return this thread to you all for continued anger, angst, and outrage about the actions of a company that makes software a lot of folks actually like.
What's the later go to do with the former?
People are complaining about a big change that affects them.
Why should they be able to do that?
You can complain about a company and/or product and still like it, they aren't mutually exclusive.
The flaw with this reasoning is that Eagle is not currently a class-leading tool. Its niche has been the maker/small business space, and its customers have neither the need nor the financial means to afford a best-in-class tool.
Don't forget the time and thus money it will take to go to another softwarepackage.
I personally think that people will stick with their old perpetual version till they really can not anymore, such as that the OS does not run it properly anymore.
One thing all Eagle users are already used to is that it does not have state of the art tech, there were not many valuable updates or significant improvements, so the current version can stil last a decade. Time enough to slowly transfer somewhere else, leaving Autodesk with no customers and no income.
Honestly, all the vitriol from the maker community at every, single software platform they interact with ought to be a lesson to software companies everywhere to stop bothering to the maker/hobbiest market at all.
You guys are funny. Microsoft, Adobe and many others have moved to a subscription model. I wonder why...
Because they make more money that way. Doesn't mean it's good for everyone else.
...The fundamental problem is that in a saturated market a licensing model is the only way for a company to continue to make make money...
Comparisons have been made to Fusion360, but from what I've seen this is a class-leading tool which offers way more for the money than anything else on the market - as & when I have a need for serious 3D design I wouldn't hesitate to subscribe.
Question for people who have used a reasonable number of PCB packages - given a choice based purely on UI and features, not price, how many would choose Eagle?
One thing to note when comparing say the Altium and the Eagle subscription model is that an AD subscription is not usually quite the same thing as an Eagle one....
We bought an AD license and subscribe to get the updates, which works for us, but if we let the subscription lapse AD does not stop working, we simply stop getting updates, this is fundamentally different to the Eagle model, and I suspect a lot of that subscription revenue for Altium is update subscriptions on perpetual licenses.
Now Altium pricing has been messed about with in all sorts of ways over the years, but lump sum for the package plus subscribe to get updates and support is a very, very standard model for high end tools, and has none of the downsides that the Eagle model has.