New eagle licensing -> goodbye Eagle

I agree.I have a 5 user licenses, been a user for 7 years, users at different locations and no VPN. Now I have to go through a series of handstands to use what I bought. BS. My time is better spent on make money and not wasting it. I've been mulling over Altium, which incidentally imports Eagle files, it costs a bunch but this maybe the push I need.

On 18/07/14 22:01, Simon Gornall wrote:

So, I've used Eagle now for over 10 years. In all that time I've always

upgraded to the latest version, but that's just stopped.

 

I have multiple computers, and I use multiple locations. I've always

only ever used one instance of Eagle at a time, and I've never given the

license details to anyone else. Unfortunately, the latest way in which

Eagle is licensed is way too restrictive for me to work with the product

as I have done for over a decade now.

I absolutely agree. Part of the reason I picked EAGLE was because of the

relatively liberal licensing policy. "Install on as many PCs as you

like, as long as they all belong to you personally and only one PC is

running EAGLE at a time". Great!

The reason I switched to EAGLE in the first place was a competitor

product which employed node-locked licensing. My PC failed, and they

demanded I buy the product again to get a new license key. I declined.

Some months later, they went out of business...

What is the EAGLE hostID generated from? The motherboard? The hard

drive? The partition serial numbers? The network card MAC address?

If my network card, motherboard or whatever the HostID is based on

fails, do I need to buy a new license? These type of license policies

are very clearly profit-oriented and anti-consumer, and tells your

customers that you don't trust them.

The problem is two-fold:

• You are only allowed to install on 2 (which is pitiful!) computers if

you have a single user license.

• You cannot use a flexlm-based license for a single-user license.

 

• If your PC (or in the case of some license managers, your network

card) fails, you can't use the software and have to buy a new license,

or at least wait for a new license key.

• If your PC is stolen (very common for laptops), you lose one of your

two licenses...

• Some of us have more than one PC. I have a desktop in my office, an

SFF desktop in the lab, a netbook and a full-size laptop. So I'd have to

buy two separate EAGLE licenses (or a five-machine site license) just to

have enough "single user" seats to use EAGLE on all these machines, even

though I only use one at a time!

The combination of those two things means I can't duplicate the setup I

currently have, so this is the classic example of how proprietary

software owners can screw you over without you having any recompense or

workaround, despite you being a paying and loyal customer for an

extended period of time. I don't consider cracking the software to be an

adequate workaround.

 

So, if I'm going to have to spend $$$ in the thousands, I'll take a good

look at the competition first, and even at the freebies like kikad.

Kicad is starting to look really good - CERN have been putting a lot of

work in. I just don't like the lack of continuous forward/back

annotation (one of EAGLE's killer features).

A primary rule for any software "upgrade" is "don't break the existing

workflows". Eagle v7 is completely useless to me, not because of its

feature-set, not because of any price issues, but because the management

is being pants-on-head moronic about how it goes about licensing.

Licensing, of all things.

Agreed. Hierarchical design was one of the features I really wanted to

try (especially if I can reuse hierarchical design units), and I'd

gladly have paid the upgrade fee for it.

But with these licensing changes, I will not be upgrading, and I'll be

looking at competing products (of which there are many).

For corporate customers this probably won't be an issue (most of them

probably buy enough 'seats' to get a server-based floating license

anyway). But for hobbyists? This is going to be a deal breaker.

Thanks,

--

Phil.

philpem@philpem.me.uk

http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On 18.07.2014 23:01, Simon Gornall wrote:

I have multiple computers, and I use multiple locations. I've always

only ever used one instance of Eagle at a time, and I've never given the

license details to anyone else. Unfortunately, the latest way in which

Eagle is licensed is way too restrictive for me to work with the product

as I have done for over a decade now.

Same here.... We even have a 3 seat license, which in the last 10 years

never was used with more than a single user.

Markus

It looks like Cadsoft want to piss off their customers. The most important question for them is, how many more licences will they sell because of this "improved license management" and how many future sales/upgrades they will lose...

It's true that you can find pirated copies with torrent but, honestly, people who use those pirated copies for free, will never buy a license because they are not professionals. For them it's not important enough to spend money for a license. So, their is not much gain for Cadsoft.

And I'm sure that also V7 will be cracked and available on torrent soon. In the end, honest people who have bought a license will be punished with this silly "host-id" restriction and the pirates will continue laughing.

We have bought a license for the professional version (V6) but with this "improved license management" it's unlikely that we are going to upgrade...

Could this all be because Farnell has bought Cadsof Eagle?

Our company has a 3 seat Pro license and we will be searching for another CAD software to use.

Bob Moreno

I agree that it happened because of purchase of CadSoft. Guys in Farnell believe that forcing stricter licensing policies will bring less pirate action and more revenue. As some of us already said here, pirates will not be affected and will just laugh on rightful people having issues with new version. If people will not be upgrading to 7.0, v.6 will stay the de-facto standard, and pirates will have even easier life...

What can I recommend to Farnell? If you want more revenue, do better sales and marketing job getting new businesses. More customers having more designs. Less sellers on the market selling designs using non-licensed software.

Existing revenue cow can die if abused. Change of business model is possible, but it should be very careful, and responsive. That's basics!

I personally invested my time in supporting EAGLE (see http://kb.gr8bit.ru/KB0015/GR8BIT-KB0015-Best-practices-creating-designs-with-EAGLE.html), and wish it long fruitful life - for CadSoft and its users. Let's hope it will get better, and, anyway, we still have version 6, which works well and satisfies our needs.

The licensing change is really unfortunate, and means there's no way I can upgrade, even though the features are most interesting.  Reasons:

1. Running a license server means I need to immediately involve IT in the software purchasing decision.  We're a small research group at the far flung edge of the world, without local IT or EngOps. So this means I have to work with "national" IT, and coordinate work with company wide IT about 16 hours away.  For $1000-$2000 of software? They're already busy as it is, and their first question will be: what alternatives are there?

2. The 2 or 3 people using eagle now need VPN access.  We've never needed it before, all our email and voice/video conferring is done without VPN access and provides 99% of the people what they need.  Again, back to IT for assistance.

3. We frequently work at test labs, or remote sites around the world.  Getting VPN access, if at all possible is probably going to be over roaming sim cards via tethered phones.  We either can't pull up schematics anymore, or we're going to be paying huge amounts of money to tether to roaming sim cards.  For what?  Eagle to do a license check? 

Solidworks, IAR, etc all have these problems and they're already a royal pain.  Need to replace the IAR dongle? $500-$750 to replace. Ran into that lovely problem when an airline lost some luggage.  Never again am I going willingly down that route with any company.  To bad too, I've worked with eagle for almost 10 years.

Wow, thanks for this 'news'!

I used the hobby version just because many friends do/did. For business (very small) I looked at the professional versions, but found for the board area and layers I required Eagle was just too expensive, so even with my Eagle experience decided to opt for DesignSpark PCB which has absolutely no hassle regarding licensing.

I regularly move my designs between my laptop and desktops according to where I'm working and as the sole user feel this should be acceptable for a single user licence (think this was the old Borland analogy, treat it as a book, read it where you require, but don't copy it?), so now extremely pleased I made the right decision for me and invested the time to learn a new package.

Although DSPCB has some limitations for my manual layouts (I believe strongly this is the designers responsibility) I find I can achieve good designs efficiently and it is well suited to most users, both hobby and professional.

If I want more features then I'm not sure what software I would progress to, but it certainly will not now be Eagle!

Glad I wandered here to see what new features were incorporated in Eagle........

I purchased Eagle Pro about 10 years ago after very carefully evaluating all the options - I was already proficient with most of the major CAD packages. I have not regretted the decision - Eagle is a great little CAd package and I have designed hundreds of PCBs with it. However its very success as a great little CAD package is pushing it to transition further away from the hobbiest and educational markets towards the mainstream industrial CAD market and all their associated infrastructure. This is a difficult transition in a competitive market and I don't pretend to understand why they feel this licensing policy is the best approach to meet their goals, but I'm sure they have reasons.

Unfortunately, this takes Eagle off its position as the #1 most desirable CAD package for users in my market segment.

Fortunately, I will be able to use version 6 to meet my needs for a few years before I need to make another careful choice.

As an aside, in this age of technology, where big brother knows your every move, it is easy to figure out how to track software usage without any draconian licensing policies and you don't even need to get involved in policing - every police force now has a software fraud squad.

I started using Eagle on my Mac in 2010, and purchased Eagle Professional v5 with schematic, layout and autorouter. I use it for hobby purposes, but I use higher-end PCB CAD software at work in my day job, so I just felt too constrained by the limitations of the lower tiers of Eagle.

I then upgraded to Eagle Professional v6 in 2012. As I recall, that was a paid upgrade, and I happily upgraded due to the new features in v6.

Due to the licensing change in v7, not to mention the brain-dead removal of prior versions when installing v7, I will not be upgrading to v7. I'll continue using v6 for the time being, until I find a better alternative. KiCad is starting to look interesting. I clearly don't mind paying for good software, but I will not tolerate intrusive license management. Even if upgrading to v7 was free of charge, I would not upgrade due to its intrusive license management.

Of course, once I become satisfied with another tool, I won't be likely to switch back to Eagle even if they remove the intrusive licensing enforcement in some later version. Switching CAD systems is not a decision to be taken lightly, and it takes strong reasons to force an engineer to change tools. The licensing in v7 is a strong enough reason to cause me to drop Eagle and switch to another tool.

I guess v6.6.0 will be my last one as well. I use Eagle on two separate workstations as well as my laptop that I travel with. All of them are single instances, meaning I'm not running them at the same time. However, our machines do go through upgrades/replacements at least once a year (at different intervals) and to have to deal with hostids and what not each and every time, not to mention needing at least two licenses (since it's possible to install one license on two machines), it's just not worth it anymore. This was a bad move on CADSoft/Farnell and I wish them the best in the future. They lost another customer not to mention the many friends I've originally recommended Eagle to who are now also leaving.

Hello All,

In light of all of the issues of the new licensing mechanism, we have

decided to revert to our licensing scheme. There will no longer be a

requirement to use a HostID or FlexLM server.

Thank you all for your feedback.

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia

The licencing is the main reason I didn't upgrade past V5. I do fancy some of the new features and I was considering upgrading but not if I have to loose the flexibility of running EAGLE at work, home and laptop. Whilst Cadsoft may have prevented some licencing fraud in my case they lost both the V6 and V7 upgrades.

I like EAGLE and I will continue to use my v5 version as long as I can; then move to something else. KiCad perhaps. The good news is that the v5 runs on Windows 10 so I am not pressed to change and I can continue to maintain the old projects.

I've read the first and last pages and so I understand the issue to be resolved with this particular product, but I had an idea that I just wanted to put out there.

"You are only allowed to install on 2 (which is pitiful!) computers if you have a single user license."

What about the possibility of installing to a virtual machine? If that is allowed at all, then that could solve the problem since you'd be able to put the virtual machine file on a external drive or keep it in the cloud and boot it to any host machine you happen to have available.

Of course it's not an ideal solution since the virtual machine is always a fraction of the power of the bare metal machine. Technically it would only be installed to the one virtual machine which would only exist when it is booted. Another workaround is to use one of many programs that allows you to control a computer remotely. Of course that requires a network connection.

Someday the notion of having a single machine will be erased as home computers become made up of arrays of single board computers setup like a supercomputer. Rather than upgrade to a faster desktop, increasing compute power will be accomplished by adding boards to the array. Boards that go bad will simply be removed from the array.

When a person buys a product they expect to pay one time. When they buy a service or a subscription, that's different. If two people share three cars, they end up paying for six insurance policies, one per person per car. They don't expect to do the same with software.

It's not the same and should not be billed the same. Software is not insurance. If it was, then it should be regulated like insurance is regulated. Think about that.