Eagle PCB software changing to subscription based services
WBA Consulting
Posts: 2,934
I don't use Eagle personally (use DipTrace or Altium), but I know many on these forums do. Autodesk has decided to change the pay structure for the software which may force many people to move away from Eagle and choose DipTrace or KiCAD or some other software package.
http://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/the-new-eagle-subscription-has-landed/
It sounds like current versions will be unaffected, but new versions will only fall under subscription based services.
http://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/the-new-eagle-subscription-has-landed/
It sounds like current versions will be unaffected, but new versions will only fall under subscription based services.
Comments
The KiCAD Shove Router is very capable, their Schematic side more average.
Some of this is semantics.
The old 'Software maintenance & support' was essentially subscription.
Part of the driver of this, is the cash-flow side. Users tend to let 'Software maintenance & support' lapse, and the up-front costs mean CapEx hoops for many to jump through.
Subscription is less explaining, less justification meetings, and it is how Netflix and Spotify etc work.
Plus the NET means companies have a serious NAG pathway, if your subscription lapses
Bottom line is, more dollars flowing to AutoDesk.
Notice they are very careful to avoid saying what happens if you do lapse your subscription, in terms of continued operation, or if their license manager needs internet connection to operate.
Also vague is how the license works over multiple PCs.
It's easy for example to have KiCAD installs on a desktop and tablet/notebook for portable use.
-Phil
Twenty five years or so ago I worked for a couple of years with Racal-Redac on their Cadstar Schematic and PCB design package. It sold for about £10,000 a seat. This was the "baby"of their products than ran on PCs. The "real" stuff, called Visula, ran on Unix workstations and was even more expensive.
A couple of times the management held big meeting with all the software engineers, project leaders, sales guys, etc. A big topic of discussion was "What features can we add to Cadstar to get more sales, and specifically get existing customers to buy upgrades?"
This was the first time I had ever worked on commercial software package, being an embedded systems kind of guy, so I was new to the business aspect. One time I stuck my hand up and asked about something I did not understand: "Are we in the business of selling a product or are we in the business of providing a service?". It had occurred to me that as software needed endless maintenance, bug fixing, enhancement, porting, etc, which was a continuous software effort, the service model would be a better fit.
My question fell on deaf ears, they did not seem to understand what I meant and shrugged it off. In their minds they were making a product for big bucks.
How times change!
P.S. Amazingly you can still buy Cadstar. Now owned by Zuken: http://www.zuken.com/en/products/pcb-design/cadstar
There is even a free version, 300 pins & 50 components.
Hmmm... as always, what they do NOT say, matters more.
Some chatter on the other forums shows a serious backlash to the mandated internet connection angle.
There is some small tolerance (some days) to dropouts, but if Autodesk bails, or their servers go off line in 5-10 years, users designs are in the dead-duck basket.
Also no mention of what range of versions their servers will deliver.
Someone lapsed might find themselves in a data-ransom situation.
That's a lot of risks and what-ifs that many are choosing to avoid.
For decades people upgraded their machines frequently. Things changed rapidly, 16 to 32 bit, the arrival of networking, then USB, ever better graphics cards, and always faster, faster. With every purchase came a new install and quite possibly a new version of DOS then Windows. With every new machine MS collected the rent.
Only if you go along with their update recommendations. I've still got computers that run Win98 and WinXP. And I've never upgraded any PCs beyond Win7. My ancient, licensed versions of Word and Excel work just fine, although Win7 seems to think that Excel was written by someone else. Whenever I start it up, it asks if I want to run a program from an untrusted source! (Maybe they're just acknowledging something that everyone else seems to know.
-Phil
Twenty fives years ago, permanent interconnection was not the norm.
These days, I know plenty who insist that their company R&D machines are NOT internet connected, which is mainly from a Patent and IP protection angle. I guess AutoDesk can ignore that subset, and target the more casual users.
Sure, but I think Phil's point was around the sales-pitch used back then....
Yes, & this rapid obsolesce, and Microsoft's eagerness to retire older OS versions, (to help drive sales of newer versions...) did see some push-back.
In some places there were lawsuits, that forced Microsoft to provide HW compatible older OS, to avoid driving up the waste PC pathways. IIRC Microsoft is effectively allowed to charge for supplying an OS, but users have the right to downgrade to what runs on their hardware. As the NET inproves, this cost them less and less to provide, and anything that reduces waste streams and gets more schools into PCs is a good thing.
My licensed Office 98 does not work with Windows after XP (or was it 7?). So I was forced to purchase Office 2013 when I purchased my latest laptop with Windows 8. Oh how I hated the menu changes after Office 98 !!!
I upgraded to Windows 8.2 and then Windows 10 (at least this was free, but so it should have been as 8 was basically unusable!
Then a company I do some work with wanted me on their cloud and MS Exchange, so they purchased a seat to their system which includes Office 365 at a hefty cost considering it is monthly.
To use their cloud, share data such as spreadsheets and word documents, and email on their servers, I needed to run Office 365. I did this 2 years ago. Now I find that Office 365 removed my Office 2013 license! Over the last month Office 365 started complaining that my office products were unlicensed. Then the inevitable happened last week.
Office began running in restricted mode... Outlook would not let me write or send an email, Excel and Word would not let me edit a document.
I heckled and I still have a Office Business Subscription. Reinstalling did not fix it. I went onto MS Support Chat. They took over my laptop remotely but ultimately they couldn't help so they told me to phone MS for support. I did that and while checking our subscription discovered the company uses Telstra (our cloud supplier) to provide the seats subscription so I needed to ring them! But MS had falsely upgraded and restricted my software while phoning home to MS!!! At least they confirmed that uninstalling Office would not delete my data. What you say, don't be stupid, MS wouldn't delete your data. Well, that is not what MS says on their website if Office has gone into restricted mode - MS clearly says that deleting Office will delete your data (read email, excel, word) files!
So, fed up, I removed Office 365. But I found I had two installations of it and had to remove both to get rid of it. My data files were not deleted. I downloaded the free WPS Office and confirmed WPS Word and Spreadsheet both can access and update my word and excel files. I downloaded the free mail Mozilla Thunderbird, but it cannot import my outlook xxx.pst files
Then I reinstalled Office 365 from my subscription cloud and it worked!!! I am now considered legal again.
FWIW, 4 months ago MS acknowledged a bug in Outlook 365/2016 that crashes Outlook on launch if I connect to the Internet via my iPhone or iPad hotspot and have told Windows my connection is NOT metered. It works if I set the connection as metered BUT then Outlook will NOT automatically check if I have emails, nor send any in my outbox, until I manually click send/receive. This has become unbearable as its my only internet connection.
Now it's my intention to no longer use MS Word or Excel, but instead use WPS Word and Spreadsheet. And I am eager to find out how to export my emails so I can get off using Outlook.
I am sick of...
1. Software phoning home (and without consent)
2. Subscription software
3. Big brother (government and software providers snooping my private data)
4. Software companies being able to remotely disable my legally purchased software.
As a number of you have said, there is no longer the guarantee that we will be able to access our private data in the future, whether we purchase or subscribe to software. A lot of software now wants to phone home regularly, and if you don't do so, the chances of it stopping to work is increasing!
FWIW In the early 1980's governments introduced laws to make mini and mainframe hardware and software suppliers responsible for consequential damages.
Currently PC hardware and software suppliers (and Phone and Tablet suppliers should be included too) seem immune from these damages. IMHO the law needs fixing.
</ end of rant >
I'm using Altium now at work and DesignSpark PCB at home. I never really liked EagleCAD's design restrictions (back then 100 x80mm max and 1-schematic sheet) and its restrictive free licence terms i.e. non-commercial use only.
That is nice to hear about Cadstar. I have not seen it in use professionally for about 15 years and I have never seen it mentioned in hobbyist circles. Until recently I just assumed it had gone down with Racal-Redac.
I suspect there is none of my software left in Cadstar today. Cadstar was originally written in PL/M 86 for MS-DOS. It's amazing what it could do on a PC when kitted out with full memory, RAM expansions, monster graphics cards (for the day) and huge monitors. When I worked on Cadstar last they had just contracted a guy to write a PL/M to C translator so they could get it running under Windows. Quite likely all that has been reworked in C++ by now.
A few of the guys I worked with on Cadstar formed their own company and made a PCB package when Redac went down. That became quite well known. I forget what it was called now. Our member Leon knows.
Hmm...perhaps I should try that free Cadstar version. Just for old times sake.
http://www.pulsonix.com/
I've used it for years.
As far as I can tell a company formed by the guys I worked with at Racal in Tewkesbury , Dave Manns and John Fallows.
Two of the smartest guys I ever worked with.
It was crazy hard work on Cadstar at the time, but a lot of fun as well.
If you made a dumb mistake they would stick a dunces hat on your head and make a big show of it, the "plonker hat". Luckily I never earned the plonker hat.
Racal-Redac was the only place I ever worked that would pile up free beer at Friday lunch time. The "beer bust". In an effort to stop people sloping off to the pub for lunch and never coming back!
It's the only place I worked at where you could throw food at the directors during the Christmas lunch and they would take it in good humor!
Ahhh, happy times....
https://www.eevblog.com/
As far as I can tell Eagle has never been a big thing in the commercial world. There are many better options there if you want to pay money.
I never understood why the open hardware and hobbyist world tied itself to a limited commercial product. When the likes of KiCad were available.
As such I think Eagle is probably dead now.
There is a reason why Richard Stallman has been shouting about and creating Free Software for decades.
Either we have control of our possessions or "they" do.
David Manns runs things. I don't know about John Fallows. Most of the other people there are from Racal-Redac. Bob Williams is someone else I know.
As far as I can tell from googling around John has been out of there for some time. I think he first took me on as a contractor, at Racal, because I was one of the few software guys around at the time that knew what a PCB was and had any idea about designing one.
If you know them at all say "Hello" from me. I doubt they remember me by now though.
PWB ?
-Phil
Complete with a parallel port dongle that took a seed value and returned a load of bytes that got XOR'd with some program code that in turn seeded the dongle with another value so that you could extract another load of bytes to XOR with yet another bit of program before it would run.
Or so I'm told
Turns out "PWB" is a thing and a topic of much debate: http://www.circuitnet.com/experts/59367.html
There is even a company that makes them: http://www.ibiden.com/company/division/pickup/fvss.html
Well I never.
Yes, that dongle. What a pain. Especially when you had to piggy back a few of them to get different programs running.
Luckily we could build the thing without that protection
I do recall seeing a device at some show or demo that would definitely make Printed Wiring Boards. It placed fine insulated wire from point to point on a board. Don't recall much in the way of details, but a post with a small wheel pressed the wire down and bonded the insulation to the board. Looked like a beefed up version of an xy pen plotter.
At the time I thought it was a great idea, but never heard anything about it after that one encounter.
By the way: in exploring new and old technologies of communication I realized, a blank can make a big difference
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But that won't fly. The computers the hardware designers in my company use won't have internet access, full stop. That's being implemented world wide, in every office. It will not be possible to bring the computer to a network connection and 'plug it in' every two weeks - anything computer-like which holds company designs will *never* touch the internet. And I suspect we're not the only ones doing this, it's completely understandable if you look at the other side of the firewall and watch the breakin attempts. We're also connected to a national monitoring service, and they see continuous industrial spionage attacks. And too many of those still succeed. So the way the industry does this will have to change, and it is being changed.
There are some types of software which can work with network subscription and cloud models - who cares about "trivial" style documents written in 365 - but that won't do for hardware design and a *lot* of other stuff.
Autodesk will lose this one.
Wow! I feel that leaving my other half on Windows and Office any longer is like walking the edge of a cliff. It's just a question of time before she's losing important stuff. She's been asking about alternatives for some time anyway, after the horrors of Win10 (NB - she's not using a US version of 10, which may contribute to the problems, but yes that version is 100% junk. 8.1 worked fine. But then you have the Office (and Outlook - but she already moved away from Outlook when she moved away from Windows 7, which is a relief) disasters in waiting, whatever version you use).
So do they have another computer to use when they need internet access? e.g. to get onto the synopsis/cadence/xilinx/altera/... sites?