Dear Autodesk,
We are small company that have a license for EAGLE v7 and we
are quite happy using it.
It is excellent news that you have released version 8 and we
are excited with the prospects of innovations you may be delivering
for version 9, 10 ,11 etc in a future to come.
We understand that EAGLE now is available on subscription only,
that is fine with us. The only problem we see is that the fee value
for premium ver. 70euro/month seems quite wrong for our small company
business model.
We would like to see a monthly fee of 780 euro for using Eagle.
That really is much more realistic.
Our proposed terms are negotiable and we may drop amount that Autodesk
needs to pay us for the usage of Eagle quite a bit depending on some
licensing improvements Autodesk may do.
--
It is our understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that Eagle projects
can only be opened in Eagle. Also Eagle only saves CAD files in Eagle
format.
So it is our understanding that we cannot use other software tools
to continue a work started in Eagle nor we can use anything else to view
Eagle files.
Therefore Autodesk will have the power to affect, impact or even disrupt our
work-flow and our design efforts (that cost us money).
Note this situation is totally different from MS-office or
Photoshop-Adobe or
even Autocad where files that can be worked out (almost) flawlessly in many
other software packages.
Our HDRM (hypothetical daily risk manager) (me) did a brief analysis of
our present
and past projects and calculated a monthly fee of about 850euro to cover
the risks
associated with granting a third party company the power to interfere
with our business.
We concluded that it does not matter if we are going to use Eagle a
little or a lot
or even if we did not used it at all for a period. As long as we want to
have the availability
to use it immediately (with or without Internet) when we so desire we
must keep paying a monthly or yearly subscription fee. to have the power
to use it.
Okay... sounds fair.
In the same way, it does not matter if Autodesk will use or not his power to
stop us from working on a project (either in the form of unintentional
unavailability
of license servers, or eventual loose of interest in Eagle and drop it,
or simply going out of business one day) as long as Autodest wants to
have that
disruptive interfering power in our small company should also be paying
us the
corresponding risk fee. If the previous sounds fair this one must sound
equally fair.
So the math is simple: 850(our risk)-70(eagle subs) = 780euro/month we are
willing to receive from Autodesk to start using Eagle 8 and newer.
We can depart from here as our position is fully negotiable 
We see quite ugly (to say the least) renting something that force us
to keep renting or otherwise face a retroactive loss.
Again I stress it is not fair since you don't view and edit Eagle files
elsewhere but in eagle.
Also not pretty to deny the common practice in long term projects
to backup all development environment and be able to recreate it later.
There is always a possibility to annoy all users by adding a powerful
"save-as/export" to solve this specific unfairness of your renting model
and stick to it...
I still see some other interesting options for Autodesk like adding the good
old perpetual license model, or simply take a seat and watch us all
move elsewhere.
Yours faithfully.
Luis C.
