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  • Author Author: dougw
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Which CAD Licensing Model Is Preferred?

There is a big debate occuring now due to changes to the Eagle CAD licensing policies.

I am hearing:

  1. the old Eagle licence policies are more attractive than the new policies
  2. low cost crippled versions are not very attractive as they ultimately result in paying full price or wasting the learning curve investment
  3. there are limits to what makers are willing to put  up with, whether it is performance, cost or learning investment, but they are willing to put up with a certain amount of it when necessary
  4. products that push these limits will alienate some makers and not enjoy wide-spread acceptance

Given that manufacturers want to generate a continuous revenue stream from each product, what is the most acceptable method of extracting cash from makers?

  1. subscription (obvious continuous revenue)
  2. pay-per-view (obvious continuous revenue)
  3. advertising (Google & cloud model)
  4. pay-per-product (not continuous, but users will by new product when new products provide better performance)
  5. perpetual license with maintenance fees (normal CAD model)
  6. other

If any of these is a low enough cost it will gain users, but assuming they are all the same cost, which is preferred?

  • I would  prefer to buy a bug-free product that I can do whatever I want with.

    If there are bug fixes, they should be free.

    If a new version is developed, it is a new product that I can choose to buy or not.

    The whole concept of licensing software without an option to buy and own the product is repulsive to me.

  • Thus far I only use perpetual license softwear.  I suppose at some point my CAD (and others) will get too old to be compatable, but that hasn't happened yet (and I've saved a ton on softwear costs as I continue to use older versions of titles that have moved to subscription models)

  • I would like the system to track my use, and if it figures I am using it professionally then charge me. The tricky part is tracking my use to distinguish professional from amateur.

     

    On the surface this appears tricky, but just get creative.

     

    Consider... if it is never used during business hours then consider it amateur. Easy to come up with more sophisticated algorithms.

  • I voted "maintenance fees", perpetual license + annual maintenance, but perpetual license + optional upgrades would be the real preference.

     

    To add to this, I accept that some kind of hardware locking may be required to discourage casual copying - I prefer things locked to a MAC address - because you can then use a USB network adapter like a dongle if you want.

     

    I don't approve of penalties if you don't pay maintenance every year (although two products, at least, that I use apply this (Keil/ARM and Matlab)).

     

    The least hassle I've had is from EasyPC (Number one systems) - perpetual license, no locking on standard product and optional upgrades at about 15% of new price. I've never missed an upgrade because they are cheap, have always offered something, never screwed up old designs and I feel I'm more likely to get good support for the latest version (I wish other suppliers would do the same but I don't know of any who do image).

     

    MK

  • Hi Doug,

     

    Maybe there are things/guidelines that have been learnt by us and it may be worth listing the ones we can think of, from personal experience or from what we've heard. These are not necessarily for EAGLE, but are just general ideas. I'm not an expert, and it is just stuff I believe, so to be taken with a pinch of salt.. and others will have different ideas/guidelines.

     

    1. A software lock is different from a license; a license is a bit of paper (or an agreement in some other form), and can be enforced through a locking mechanism, or can be met through trust that the parties involved will cease to use a product if their paper license expires

    2. Generally the important customers (the ones that would have paid for software, and/or the ones willing to pay for support) will not abuse a license intentionally

    3. Sometimes it is better not to have a locking mechanism if it means there is a risk that legitimate customers could end up in a situation where their software ceases to function through no fault of their own.

    4. Sometimes it is better to take the hit that some people will abuse a license, in order not to unduly inconvenience legitimate users from jumping through hoops to run their software. As an example, I hate that Tesco (supermarket) makes me waste a few minutes each week to re-scan my receipt to avoid a parking fine. I would rather they just accept the fact that some people will park but not shop at the supermarket. So now I make an effort to shop elsewhere, and they probably lose $5k per year as a result of my action (and maybe they gain $5k from another customer but that's not my concern).

    5. Generally for a subscription model you can encourage people to want to move to this, by showing them a cost reduction (e.g. over time) and/or an increase in functionality/productivity that they will get for no additional cost (e.g. over time), and/or extra things that enable the overall cost to be cheaper than the sum of the individual things (e.g. phone support).

    6. The increase in productivity/functionality can't entirely be a promise of upcoming features, some of it has to be features that you're bundling into the subscription at the time of the purchase of the subscription

    7. No-one likes restrictions, but people are willing to pay to enable features or performance, but only within reasonable rules per feature/performance item. For instance, having restrictions on board size and number of pins and number of layers could be considered 2 dimensions too many. For each feature that is being enabled, it can be better to control it in just one dimension. As an example, if you want to unlock PCB project size, then this could be based on pins, board size, or number of layers, but not all three.

    8. There will always be some customers who will want to milk the product for as long as possible (e.g. continuing to use versions written say five years ago) despite that release long being retired. But even those customers are (at least mentally if not formally) putting a price on the product, they are just stretching it over a long period of years (this I suspect is the case for many EAGLE users). Even those users won't necessarily be subscription model averse, if the pricing reflects that they too can benefit over the period of time they would ordinarily milk the product, which can be naturally reduced if highly attractive new features encourage them to upgrade sooner.

    9. Sometimes a guarantee is needed, e.g. each release of software will continue to be supported (e.g. bug-fixes) for X years, and there will be a new release every Y months. That way if a release doesn't occur, then people can see the warning signs and still have X years to migrate.

  • So my first choice would be pay per product, i.e. how EAGLE works now, but I have no real issue with a subscription model if it is cheap enough or alternatively a lower up-front cost and then maintenance charges if they are reasonable.

     

    The issue with the current EAGLE subscription is the lack of any way of having a perpetual v8 license, the loss of the non-commercial maker license and the jump between Standard and Premium being quite large. Fix these three issues and the current EAGLE subscription system would probably have a lot more takers and create more revenue.

     

    For the reasons stated above I picked "some combination" because I would be happy with any of these options if they were well thought out and fairly priced.