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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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @12:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @12:10AM (#457482)

    > Out of curiosity, vs. Eagle, is Kicad...

    I find (a). KiCAD is pretty good. I used it a while back on a large(ish) hobby board. It took some getting used to.

    The newer versions have come leaps and bounds. I still don't like how it manages/edits component libraries, but that's a mostly one-off cost on each project.

    KiCAD feels familiar to the workflow that I like (I came from Protel99 and the places I was working stuck with it for a very long time because it was so good - it just got out of your way and let you work). It's too bad some of its keyboard shortcuts are chorded (shift-P, for example) and require me to take my right hand off the mouse for common actions. I don't do enough in KiCAD to have started working out whether they can be changed.

    Switch to it. Dump the malware that Eagle has just become. That, or just don't upgrade your old perpetual licensed version if it's doing everything you need. You'll be happy enough. The only problem I have with KiCAD is that a lot of places (E14, SparkFun, Adafruit, Arduino, RPi, etc) still have Eagle files available on their sites. Not a deal breaker, but it is an extra step to getting things done when I needed to convert something. The conversion somehow feels risky and requires a lot of manual checking.