Dave,
Now might be a good time for an AmpHour/EEVBlog Video Rant regarding CAD licensing stupidity, as pretty every *every* vendor (excluding KiCAD) seems to get this wrong.
Was about to do a rant on it, already had the title "The Eagle Has Sunk". But I think that 14 day thing has saved them, at least for the low cost version. This limtation should not exist for the paid professional version though.
14 days is still not good of course, but it will still let 99% of people work offline.
That 14 day part screwed me well and truly over, but that is simply because I think I'm in the minority of those who spend a fair bit of time in the middle of AU where there is either zero (or pretty close to that in terms of connectivity) for extended periods of time.
While, I'm not jumping up and down *just* yet, these changes have have left me more than a bit nervous. CAD Software is very much like religion, and that is for a very good reason - it takes a *huge* amount of time and effort to become comfortable and familiar with a tool (whether it is Altium, Eagle, KiCAD, DipCad, etc...), so naturally when a vendor decides to up and change the rules ... people get real excited ... *REAL* quick (I would image that it's the same for the FPGA/CPLD Dev software like ISE vs Vivaldi vs Quartus, etc).
Autodesk has done a completely *CRAP* job on the licensing for this one ... in the same way that CadSOFT did a crap job with V5-V6 licensing changes a few years back.
You would think that a vendor, if they are going to change the license, would have thought this one through completely. Ok, this is what we are going to do. Now, how do we communicate this effectively? How to we handle the existing paid customer base so that we don't piss off our existing customer base. How to do we handle the case where the new model *doesn't* fit an existing customer?
So far, I've not seen this done (I've watched this on a few different forums) and all that we are left with is this little "gem" from Matt on the AutoDesk Community Eagle Forum:
---> CUT HERE <---
We'll provide an upgrade path to EAGLE v8.0 here very soon! Expect an email about upgrades very soon.
Best regards,
Matt
---> END CUT <---
Now, this is from the same person who said that it won't be switching to a subscription model.... Yeah .... so lets' take this with a grain of salt.
We watch with amusement .... they (Autodesk) can either make it or seriously break it with what they say next because if they screw it up, they will be giving up their niche that they carved out for themselves in the market, and Eagle just isn't the tool to go toe-to-toe with Altium.
/BGM