Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 21 2017, @11:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the slow-death-of-proprietary-software dept.

EAGLE, The Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor is an ECAD (electronic computer-aided design), proprietary software for creating printed circuit boards. Cadsoft, the company that created it, sold EAGLE to Autodesk in June.

Hackaday reports

Autodesk has announced that EAGLE is now only available for purchase as a subscription. [Previously], users purchased EAGLE once and [could use] the software indefinitely (often for years) before deciding to move to a new version with another one-time purchase. Now, they'll be paying Autodesk on a monthly or yearly basis.

Before Autodesk purchased EAGLE from Cadsoft, a Standard license would run you $69, paid once. [...] Standard will [now] cost $15/month or $100/year and gives similar functionality to the old Premium level, but with only 2 signal layers.

[...] The next level up was Premium, at $820, paid once. [...] If you [now] need more [than 2] layers or more than 160 [sq.cm] of board space, you'll need the new Premium level, at $65/month or $500/year.
New Subscription Pricing Table for Eagle

[...] The [freeware] version still exists, but, for anyone using Eagle for commercial purposes (from Tindie sellers to engineering firms), this is a big change. Even if you agree with the new pricing, a subscription model means you never actually own the software. This model will require licensing software that needs to phone home periodically and can be killed remotely. If you need to look back at a design a few years from now, you better hope that your subscription is valid, that Autodesk is still running the license server, and that you have an active internet connection.

The page has well over 100 comments, with many saying the equivalent of "Goodbye, EAGLE; Hello, KiCAD".
KiCAD is gratis and libre, cross-platform, has been adopted as a software development project by nerds at CERN, and has seen marked improvement in recent years.

Previous:
CERN is Getting Serious About Development of the KiCAD App for Designing Printed Circuits
Scripts Make the (Proprietary) Cadsoft EAGLE-to-(FOSS) KiCAD Transition Easier

Some time back, anubi and I conversed about how EAGLE has been DRM'd for quite a long while.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:27PM

    by Rich (945) on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:27PM (#457343) Journal

    Autocad and its command line work great when used in the traditional way.

    ..once that way is firmly and irreversibly etched into the spinal matter of the operator. (Same as with Blender, for example, which may be rather efficient once mastered, but comes with its infamous learning curve.)

    The academic reasoning for verb-first is given by Raskin, The Humane Interface, pp.59, 3-3 Noun-Verb versus Verb-Noun Constructions. While that guy generally was a bit too full of himself, he's basically right as far as the locus-of-attention disrupting modes are concerned.

    But the kinetics of reluctance to change go a very long way. If they didn't, we'd all have RPN calculators now :)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:30PM

    by Rich (945) on Sunday January 22 2017, @03:30PM (#457345) Journal

    Argh. Sorry. Raskin did argue for NOUN-first, of course.