Oh, AutoDesk…you have such a way with words. Honestly, I would rather learn to design in OpenSCAD than send AutoDesk a single penny.
So if you have $1001 in annual revenue, you have to pay $680? So if your business has a running cost of %50, you need to go into the red by $180 to continue running your business?
Someone over in marketing is an idiot.
When I was working as an engineer I used both autocad and revit, autodesk has been a piece of shit company for a long, long time. Their greed knows no limits and unfortunately they have convinced their markets that the cost of working with them is just “the cost of doing business”.
I’d love to see the day they crash and burn as a company, but I have a feeling that’s just a far fetched dream.
You could replace Autodeak with Adobe in your post and it’d be exactly the same. These companies are pieces of shit.
I greatly miss the ability to simply purchase a program on a disk for a given year and just have access to that tool.
otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.
Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.
I’ve used FreeCAD for a few months for small/medium-sized projects and it crashes way too often. It’s pretty much unusable for me. I only use it for CAM these days and do my CAD with OnShape.
I think the thing people wish for was a little bit of polish in their open source tools.
I love kicad, but it used to have some really rough edges in spite of being simpler compared to something like Altium.
This is the modern “choice”:
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Paid software that exploits their own paying customers’ data and pushes regular ads for their own or for other products while simultaneously increasing prices.
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FOSS software that respects it’s users but also is nearly incapable of doing the job it’s supposed to.
The FOSS stuff can do the job. You just need to tweak these 10 config files because it doesn’t come with sensible defaults. Oh, and it’s built against a different version of those libraries. Better downgrade two and upgrade that third one. Actually, just fork and modify the source. Much easier. What were we trying to do again?
Flatpaks exist for FreeCAD.
What’s flatpak and why in the world would I need to know about it in order to use a cad program? Do you see why people don’t use this stuff?
You mean when people just ask someone else instead of heading to the single best information resource that’s ever existed in human history for an immediate answer?
No. I don’t see why people do that.
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My last couple of parts I designed in Designspark Mechanical, which I gather is a nerfed Spaceclaim. Closedf source and Windows only, and I guess that they’ve been pissing off their users too, but by removing features rather than trying to directly extort money. The reason I went with it though, is because despite being full of its own issues, it still allows commercial use with the free subscription/download.
The most likely scenario is that I never make a single dollar from my hobbies, but it’s nice that if I were to somehow stumble into something that a few people wanted to pay for, I wouldn’t owe Autodesk any money. The direct modeling also makes sense for my TinkerCAD/woodworking brain. I have tried FreeCAD and found the learning curve daunting.
It bugs me that I use tinkercad but nothing foss is nearly as friendly to use, and I tried (I think it’s librecad the parametric 3d one?) But even though I understand the concept I didn’t find any success modeling with it.
