by eatyourguitar » Fri Dec 15, 2017 7:21 pm
I tried switching to geda or kicad but I was having serious problems with security, hardware compatibility, stability and longevity of my Linux distributions that I selected to work with GEDA. So with deadlines fast approaching and clients to please, I went back to cadsoft eagle. Eagle is what I know. I would acknowledge that there is almost no reason you should not use kicad on windows or Linux. It is free and similar in capability to eagle. There is nothing wrong with dip trace either. The huge problem with eagle now is that you can no longer buy it. If you already purchased it then you can keep it but not upgrade it. If you are new and want the features of the better version of eagle you can rent it. Guitar pedal people can use the demo for small 2 layer PCB but you can not legally sell the PCB made with the demo. I don't think they can stop you at gun point from making $5 back on your huge time investment. It is definitely grey area if you do that. I think a boycott of Autodesk eagle is completely appropriate as long as they refuse to take money for one time licenses to own the software free of further restrictions. Kicad is actually free and always will be. You can update, modify, duplicate, compile and distribute free software within the license and grey hat without. The only benefit to eagle is the ubiquitousness of it after it has been well established. You can ask for a part library or plugin script and you will get it. Autodesk if you are reading this please contact me so I can help you improve your software with better hot keys and basic automation of common tasks. The only reason I won't switch to kicad or GEDA is that I don't need to. Ideally I would volunteer to build better free software but who would pay my bills? Until the world switches to free software we will be slaves to software companies who make all the decisions for anything related to technology.