New EAGLE licensing

[jorge_garcia2]

Hello Everyone,

In this post we will be briefly describing how the new subscription model for EAGLE works.

Firstly, the Autodesk licensing model is subscription based and the EAGLE paid license will require that you install the SW and then generate an account on accounts.autodesk.com to retrieve your license entitlement.   

If you lose your network connection, the SW has a 14-day heartbeat that will enable you to work offline for 14 days.

All of your data is stored locally, so you are in complete control of your data.

We will continue to provide the freeware version of EAGLE. In order to use it you will still need to register an account with Autodesk.

In an upcoming release we will be adjusting the software so in the worst case scenario, where internet is unavailable past 14 days, the software will revert to free mode. That way you can always review your designs.

You can review the current EAGLE pricing by visiting this page.

[steve.jonesK5A5K]

I've been a Eagle user for many years. Several companies i've worked for have Eagle Cad licences, along with other EDA licences.

We recently purchased a licence (I actually pushed our management to do this, because its a great application) and I do enjoy using Eagle. I also have a Mentor Graphics PADs licence and I have used Altium in the past. I use Eagle on a daily basis, and a significant amount of projects i've undertaken have been completed using Eagle. 

I understand the need to keep Shareholders happy, and subscription based licencing helps you along with that. 

I feel in this instance, you're kidding yourselves & overselling with the £60 per month licencing - Sure if the premium licensing was more like £10 - £15 per mo, it wouldn't be a discussion point. Eagle currently doesn't match up to other EDA products out there in terms of feature set and functionality - Don't get me wrong its good software, but its not a £60 per mo application.

Adobe currently operates a subscription model on their product - £69.72 per month gets you 20+ applications, stock images. (I know this isn't EDA, but I feel its illustrative of software subscription models employed by other software vendors).

The Eagle Standard licence options have never been attractive to anyone I know - 2 Layers and 160cm2 of board space - Too restrictive. 

There's no middle ground in your licencing options. And to be perfectly honest, at £60 a month subscription, i'd want a hell of a lot more features than you're currently offering! - Support isn't something I've used - forums and google searches have answered all the questions I need answering. 

I'll be looking in to Circuit Studio as an option - I certainly cannot justify £60 per mo.

Steve

[synfinatic]

Ser

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@matt.berggren wrote:

You have a legal contract between you and Cadsoft which got you that license.  We have authority nor interest in shutting down your license of 6, or 7 or what-not.

Cheers,

Matt

Autodesk.

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Wait, does CadSoft exist as a legal entity anymore?  All their websites now redirect to AutoDesk. 

[synfinatic]

Also I want to add that in another thread on this forum, AutoDesk has admitted to running the license servers for previous versions of Eagle.  Seems odd that I would have a legally binding license agreement with a company (CadSoft) which is not in position to actually provide for their end of the legal agreement.

Is AutoDesk running the license servers because they're being nice or because they purchased more then just the Eagle intellectual property?  I've gotten emails from AutoDesk to email addresses that were dedicated specifically to Eagle/CadSoft.  Which would indicate they at least also purchased the list of Eagle license holders.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is, do I have a legally binding license agreement with anyone for Eagle 7?  How would I contact them?  Right now it seems based on the replies from AutoDesk employees that the old perpetual license versions of Eagle are effectively abandonware.

For the record, according to this press release, AutoDesk purchased the company "CadSoft" as well as it's intellectual property: https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/06/27/sale-of-cadsoft-premier-farnell-cadsofttech-purchased-by-autode...

[marnix]

Also a 20 year eagle user, last years used the Professional license. We've been thinking about making the jump to Altium for a while, we just finished a 3 month trial. We were in doubt, but just needed this push to finally migrate all libraries created over the years to Altium, since the price difference is not so big anymore. A couple of 1000's of Euro's and 10ths of thousands of hours writing libraries down the toilet.

Altium for work, Ki-CAD for personal use. This is plain stupid.

*.autodesk.com     127.0.0.1

A special personal note to Jorge: Thanks for all your loyal support and webinars over the years, I wish you and your family the very best!

People needing old versions of Eagle for OSX or Windows, know where to find me. 3.x = > 7.7

Max

[jorge_garcia2]

The EAGLE standard is 4 layers now see another post on this same forum.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/a-path-forward-for-the-make-license-a-step-up-for-standard...

Maybe it doesn't make a difference to you but thought it was important to correct the oversight.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[jorge_garcia2]

Hello synfinatic,

We still monitor the old support@cadsoftusa.com email in order to continue to support our customers through this period. You can reach us there, however the preferred approach now is to go through you accounts.autodesk.com portal and report a ticket.

Ed and I as well as the rest of the Cadsoft Team ( we are all here) won't abandon users of EAGLE 7 so if you contact us we'll help in anyway can. The old versions of EAGLE can still be downloaded and will continue to be available in order to support our long time users.

Hope that is clear.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,
Jorge Garcia

[arnoldhuebsch]

Hi jorge.garcia!

The update for the 4 layers is wellcome in the standard license. For makers a Eurocard size would be required as well.

-AH-

[jorge_garcia2]

Thanks Max,

I really appreciate it, it's nice to hear from you. Hopefully, the new features coming in over the next few months can change your mind. If not, then I wish you the best and it has been a pleasure to helping you with EAGLE over the last almost 7 years.

Best Regards,

[jorge_garcia2]

Hello arnold,

The standard is eurocard capable since you can make a 160mm x 100mm board just like before. It can actually do a bit more since you can use any board dimensions you like as long as the area is less than 160cm^2.

Let me know if I'm mistaken on what the eurocard size should be.

Best Regards,

[arnoldhuebsch]

Thanks George!

Thanks for pointing this out, I guess I had something wrong with my math 😉

-AH-

[synfinatic]

Hi Jorge,

Thanks for the reply.  We're not talking about the same thing, but I'm going to assume that I just misunderstood Matt.  Ie: my Eagle 7 end user license agreement is now between myself and AutoDesk. 

[rc]

Still waiting for an answer as to why am I expected to pay a substantial penalty for being in Germany (EUR 550 compared to USD 500) ... happy to pay USD through paypal or credit card.

In the meantime I realize that installing the 8.0 free / test version on OS Sierra messed up my 7.7.0 Ultimate edition(!) - all icons are replaced by something that looks like from a 1983 Windows version. Great job!

[rachaelATWH4]

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@rc wrote:

In the meantime I realize that installing the 8.0 free / test version on OS Sierra messed up my 7.7.0 Ultimate edition(!) - all icons are replaced by something that looks like from a 1983 Windows version. Great job!

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This is a side effect of there no longer being the possibility to revert to the classic icons in v8.0. It then writes back to the config file without keeping the option which was there in v7.7.0 which causes v7.7.0 to revert to using the classic icon style from earlier versions of EAGLE. I agree with you they look like something from 1983!

To correct this issue, while in v7.7.0 go to Options->User Interface... and deselect the "Classic icon style" option. You'll then have your modern v7 onwards icons after you restart EAGLE.

Rachael

[Markus_Rudolf]

@rc wrote:

 all icons are replaced by something that looks like from a 1983 Windows version. Great job!

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I wish they had kept the possibility of reverting to the 1983 "classic icons" in V8. The "stylish" icons have been a nightmare since they got introduced in V7.

Markus

[rachaelATWH4]

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@infoQQT6H wrote:

@rc wrote:

 all icons are replaced by something that looks like from a 1983 Windows version. Great job!

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I wish they had kept the possibility of reverting to the 1983 "classic icons" in V8. The "stylish" icons have been a nightmare since they got introduced in V7.

Markus

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Maybe it's just what you are used to. I think from what I have seen you've been using EAGLE for many years so you learned all those old icons and it's all deeply ingrained with many years of use.

I didn't actually start using EAGLE properly until v7.1 and so I learned all the new icons. I don't have any trouble working out what any of them are supposed to represent and I like things to look nice so the 1980's throwback icons from earlier versions don't really work for me! Each to their own I guess.

The problem I see with keeping the old icons is they'd have to invent "new" old icons for the new features but then people would complain about those too! I can see why they went the route they did and once people have had time to adjust then it's likely not going to cause any long term issues I don't think.

[Markus_Rudolf]

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@rachaelATWH4 wrote:

Markus

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Maybe it's just what you are used to. I think from what I have seen you've been using EAGLE for many years so you learned all those old icons and it's all deeply ingrained with many years of use.

Since 1993 to be exact. Call me oldschool.

I didn't actually start using EAGLE properly until v7.1 and so I learned all the new icons. I don't have any trouble working out what any of them are supposed to represent and I like things to look nice so the 1980's throwback icons from earlier versions don't really work for me! Each to their own I guess.

The problem I see with keeping the old icons is they'd have to invent "new" old icons for the new features but then people would complain about those too! I can see why they went the route they did and once people have had time to adjust then it's likely not going to cause any long term issues I don't think.

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I don't mind if they switch to the new icon set as default, but please leave the option in on switching back to the old set.

As someone else pointed out, convert them to SVG or whatever if there is otherwise issues with high DPI displays. But it's not just me who likes the classic icons much better. They are better contrast anyhow. At least the "vomitting Halfmoon" EAGLE icon is gone now....

Markus

[rachaelATWH4]

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@infoQQT6H wrote:

I don't mind if they switch to the new icon set as default, but please leave the option in on switching back to the old set.

As someone else pointed out, convert them to SVG or whatever if there is otherwise issues with high DPI displays. But it's not just me who likes the classic icons much better. They are better contrast anyhow. At least the "vomitting Halfmoon" EAGLE icon is gone now....

Markus

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Yes it likely wouldn't be a large effort in the grand scheme of things to convert the old icons to SVG and create some "new old style" additions for the new features. They'd be stuck having to maintain 2 sets of icons going forward though. I guess it comes down to whether they see any significant benefit in the long run to doing this or whether they figure people will get used to the new ones in time anyway. I suspect they decided the latter was more likely so went with that. I can understand why you and some other long term users are unhappy with this, hopefully (assuming you stay with EAGLE) this will be a change that only has a short term impact on you while you get used to the new look.

They have more issues with HiDPI displays than just the SVG icons though. They were under the impression with v7 that the way windows deals with HiDPI displays (i.e. really badly) was the correct way things should work. Unfortunately on my Mac's the improvements weren't great as the app wasn't (and I think still isn't properly) detecting EAGLE as a HiDPI aware app and wasn't doing the stuff embedded in the OS to make everything work right. I need to spend more time looking at this in v8 and see if anything has improved on this front.

Kinda waaaaaay off topic now though!

[rc]

Thanks, Rachel!

I still have no idea why installing 8.0 changed my settings for 7.7.0 but as you pointed out, I could revert that now - guess I have the modern ones now - the others I've never seen before, but that might indeed have to do with the Retina display ... anyway, very happy I don't have to revert to a magnifying glass any more!

On a different topic - CircuitStudio looks great, offering a number of things that I've given up waiting for in Eagle (useable Spice integration), however, no Mac version available 😞

[rachaelATWH4]

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@rc wrote:

Thanks, Rachel!

I still have no idea why installing 8.0 changed my settings for 7.7.0 but as you pointed out, I could revert that now - guess I have the modern ones now - the others I've never seen before, but that might indeed have to do with the Retina display ... anyway, very happy I don't have to revert to a magnifying glass any more!

The reason it change it is EAGLE by default uses the same config file whatever versions you are running so one version can overwrite the settings from another.

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@rc wrote:

On a different topic - CircuitStudio looks great, offering a number of things that I've given up waiting for in Eagle (useable Spice integration), however, no Mac version available 😞

I have issues with CircuitStudio. Firstly it's windows only as you point out which is no good for me. Also I believe it's very "Cloudy" and I don't think you can do commercial designs and keep all your data local and not shared in the cloud. I think if you need to use Altium for professional purposes you need to shell out for Altium Designer which is a lot of money!

I think more features will come to EAGLE. I know Jorge is working on getting LTSpice working cross platform, but I am hoping that future versions will have the possibility to integrate simulation natively within EAGLE. Of course lots of enhancements to routing will probably be higher up the priority list. We'll have to see what comes along now they have this first fully Autodesk release out.

[mcarchero]

I bought standard license 3 months ago... my wife gonna kill me