Autodesk wanted to buy Altium: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-rejects-takeover-bid-from-autodesk/
Todays corporate software world. Rather than building a better product, take over a rival, to buy market share.
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And drive a product you don’t fully understand into the ground.
To be fair, it must be hard to recruit good coders that also have an understanding of what a CAD suite is trying to do. As soon as the software gets too complex for one person to understand every corner, making the whole thing work and fit user requirements gets very hard.
KiCad passed that point several years ago and it shows at times with the cracks in the Mac platform especially.
I’m sure that the commercial packages are just as full of legacy code that just just does not fit well with other parts. In my experience, documentation of commercial code tends to be worse than opensource, as pressure to meet a milestone always gets in the way.
I do not really gasp what the goal of Autodesk is. Aquire it and sell licenses under their name for profit, or integrate it into Fusion360 instead of Eagle?
If they want to improve Fusion360 it would be more wise to recruit a few dozen programmers and write it from scratch. Makes more sense than merging two codebases to create more legacy-code and duplicated codepaths. Just look at Horizon what it managed to achive in 4 years with practically one programmer.
Monopoly. That’s it. They did to the civil and architectural space with AutoCAD, but there they mostly bought out and sued any competition.
Seems what happened to eagle will continue to Altium!
But Altium will be the spoiled child…
What we are left with: KiCAD, Diptrace… I chose KiCAD since Aug 2020… The best decision I took since 1994…
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Diptrace doesn’t run in linux.
So KiCAD will rule Linux ecosystem and in long term he will be in small and mid companies I think, price of altium license is growing 
@pointhi My understanding of the situation is that Autodesk kind of took their customers hostage by turning EAGLE into a subscription-only product, meaning that as soon as you stop paying for it, you’re effectively making all of your previous design files unusable. For a company with multiple hardware revisions, that is intolerable.
Altium then ran an apparently successful promotion with the tagline “Say No To Subscription Only Licenses!” where they offered special promotions for people switching from EAGLE to Altium. They also released a PDF to explain how to migrate EAGLE projects over to Altium.
I’m guessing that Autodesk is now seeing the effect and the only way how they can continue to hold their customers’ data hostage is if they buy up Altium and then convert it to subscription-only, too.
Autodesk needs to eliminate all permanent licenses from the market, and/or make them unusuable by compatibility-breaking updates. Once that is done, they are then free to raise subscription prices as much as they want, because their customers have no other option left for opening the files. That’s why the subscriptions both for EAGLE and for Altium are so cheap now … it’s an investment into your prison cell.
Well, then they didn’t noticed users can migrate to Kicad, both from EAGLE and all Altium products 
Neither Altium does
Kind of funny thing, as their goal fromt the investors’ papers is they’re willing to cash the customers on subscriptions.
FWIW, public software companies as a rule don’t move to a subscription model to trap their users – they do it to decouple their revenue stream from their release dates. (Otherwise their stock price gets hammered every time they miss a date…)
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If only the EAGLE importer didn’t have a list of issues…it’s quite a mess 
At face value yea. Not very indirectly however is that decoupled revenue stream is directly tied to entraping users.
Importers will always have issues for three reasons:
- Incompatible features
- Incompletely reverse engineered files
- They are often one just persons work and they are unfamiliar with some of the codebase
O no, the eagle importer is very legacy in its architecture…it’s nowhere near the quality of the altium and cadstar importers. It’s not even a reverse engineering or feature problem. It’s just spaghetti code with no respect or usage of domain transfer objects which is where all the problems begin.
Either me or Wayne will rewrite it from the ground up for V7…I hope.
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im using kicad since kicad 4, it has very big potential, it will become popular like inkscape, kicad dev should focus on most used PCB designing tool feature like tear drop etc, not on less used feature like spice simulation
@JeffYoung My experience with Autodesk 3ds max was that they deliberately tried to trap users.
The company employing me owned a 2015 permanent license. Autodesk then gifted them a “free” 1 year subscription in addition to our permanent license. Included in the subscription was the new 2016 version. However, any file that you opened with the 2016 version was automatically “upgraded” so that afterwards you can not open it in 2015 anymore.
In other words, if you use the free 1 year subscription, your permanent license is afterwards useless. You’ll need to start paying for the “free” subscription after the first year, or else accept losing your data.
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