[TriEmbed] Eagle now subscription-only

[Pete Soper]

On 01/20/2017 08:36 AM, Alex Davis via TriEmbed wrote:
> Time to learn KiCad?
>
> http://hackaday.com/2017/01/19/autodesk-moves-eagle-to-subscription-only-pricing/
>
> Free version is still free, but beyond that you'll have to rent it.
>
So for $100 vs the earlier $69 you get 160 square centimeters, two 
layers and more schematic pages, but only for a year.  As you say, 
"educational" usage will continue to be free. One of the Autodesk 
honchos broadcast assurances recently that if person A makes a design 
with Autodesk-Eagle using the free version, then person B goes to sell 
work based on the PCB design, Autodesk would not go after person A. To 
get four layer support costs $500/year, which is of course entirely 
indigestible to many reading this.

I've been puttering around with KiCad for a few months and did one 
completely trivial board with it so far where the Eagle size limit 
required an alternative. But KiCad has no autorouter and I have to ask 
myself how many hours I'm willing to spend manually redoing a board with 
push and shove after a change when, with an autorouter, I can get a 90% 
solution in seconds, tweak placements, rinse and repeat, and greatly 
minimize manual steps. I once bootstrapped a simple assembler in machine 
code as a way to avoid spending so much time writing machine code: the 
glory of the harder road is greatly overrated!

But then there's four layer support and the $500/year cost of using 
Autodesk-Eagle to use that. Where I sit this moment I'm expecting to 
buckle down and get past a lot more of the KiCad learning curve while 
coughing up $100 for Autodesk for the next year.

-Pete