As the Renesas/Altium thread is already closed, I open a new one. Up on now, Renesas dont make Altium Freeware before next year, but tries to sell some seats with this end of year aggressive advertising. Obviously this should attract companies with excess budget at end of year who probably do not exist any more here in Europe. Mainly not in the automotive industry.
Every time I open Facebook, I see attached Altium advertice at first position. Anyway, with further clicks its not possible to see how much 40% is to pay absolute. They only offer a form to enter address, email and other personal data to receive a quote. Further, the translation is suspicious bumpy style German probably translated by a robot. Maybe the name of Altium is already used by Trojans?
But I really don’t remember the details with what goes on with Altium so this could have been a different company and I wouldn’t have known the difference.
But to the OP’s original point it has been interesting seeing what is going on with VM Ware also, but…
`Tis the season of avarice and gree–eed,
Fa la la la la, la la la la…’
You know the tune. (Way too familiar this time of the year. )
That is interesting and dreadful…an engineering software scam.
I would assume that Renesas acquiring Altium is a ploy to sell more Renesas ICs. (Maintain complete Renesas libraries and kick out competitors). In theory one would think that would encourage them to keep the price of Altium relatively low. At least relative to Cadence for example.
Reminds me of a comparison between Linux and Windows) everyone criticizes the first one but uses it, while everyone praises the second one but doesn’t use it. Do you understand the reason? The reason isn’t even the cost or the operating system.
Case in point: In Win 10, a context menu click in the file explorer would give me choices of copy, paste, and others in English. Now Win 11 gives us icons which make no sense to me. While it is true that I am biased by being English first language, I feel that I would rather have text in German (I do not know German) than those $#@(&&^^^ icons.
I tried using Linux Mint on an old Win7 laptop in order to run KiCad on my lab bench. But without using it very often, I found Linux to be too strange…or counter-intuitive.
Of course, whatever has been banged into our heads over the years sort of becomes “intuitive.”
Now my Win10 laptop started misbehaving and has been downgraded to my lab bench. I have a Win11 laptop on my desk. So I am no longer scratching my head about Linux Mint.
Ultimately, we all work in programs and the system is just a shell, the main problem is the lack of programs that you personally need. I constantly encounter the impossibility of fully opening everything on Linux, from documents to projects made in other CAD systems. Of course, there are all sorts of workarounds such as virtual machines and emulators, but these are all crutches.
(Way too familiar this time of the year. 
)