Hi pa3weg,
You need to have an autodesk account in order to use the freeware. You can get one for free at accounts.autodesk.com. The freeware is still free, everything is just tied to an Autodesk account.
Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.
Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia
I really do not think you understand the userbase of EAGLE very well.
Are you aware of the backtracking that happened under the farnell model with FlexLM?
Are you aware of the *HARD* requirement of some folks to work without network? ANY network?
You must be aware that some people prefer to not have "accounts". You leave them without option
Subscriptions are not Evil per-se, but my cost is increasing more than tenfold for my use case, and becomes something periodical.
my last upgrade was ~5000 euro of upgrade cost for 30 users, after three years. That is 55 euro per user per year.
Your plan is at least 500 euro per user per year. And if we choose not to upgrade for 5 years, it is cheaper.
We customers lose flexibility and the choice to upgrade whenever we want, or not.
I think we ALL agree that there are many functions and features that are a great improvement. But you are changing the EAGLE market position, and I think you are really underestimating the amount of users that will drop you.
I would gladly pay for an upgrade. Maybe even a bit more expensive upgrade if it brings me nice features like the BGA fan-out you are talking about. But I want to pay once, pay when I like to upgrade and then OWN the software (OK, the right to use it) perpetually.
And I can tell you whatever I personally like, but my company is for sure not going to approve subscription based models.
As stated earlier:
Subscription at a rational price - fine.
License forever at a rational price - fine.
License forever that suddenly goes away when somebody on the other end changes their mind - not so much.
License forever that has no equivalent subscription - not so much.
With the exception that I do not particularly care about the latter.
And I would add: options! give the user two models to choose from. Maybe discount the subscription a tiny bit if you want to persuade them. Don't overdo that though...
If you want users to keep paying you money, just create a useful program and kindly ask your users to renew. It has worked for CadSoft for the past 29 (!) years.