Software maker Altium rejects $3.9B takeover bid from Autodesk
reuters.com
reuters.com
There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.
It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.
For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
Just did the same thing last week.
As I've said, I didn't use LR for any significant amount of time. Its workflow may be smoother, but I don't prefer Adobe's software, though.
The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:
- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
- pano stitching
- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)
- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.
> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.
> pano stitching
Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.
> auto retouching;
Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.
> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.
I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.
I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.
That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground.
I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.
IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it.
DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux.
Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.
As long as Disney doesn't 'harm' consumers they are allowed to consolidate. Harm is poorly defined in this case.
In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different.
Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?
I am firm believer in the EU model of anti-trust and this wouldn't have even be possible if they both agreed.
Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.
I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk..
Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again.
That is a consequence of having a monopoly.
Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15
If they are in a monopolistic position, why would they bother with the expense?
The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths.
This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.
It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer.
Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/
I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.
I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys (Assuming you meant FreeHand instead of Pagemaker)
At least Fireworks was an actual Macromedia creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping...
Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.
Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe.
They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month.
We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD.
We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).
It’s so user hostile and constantly getting in the way of getting work done. Years ago (2001 ish) when I first started to learn CAD I used PTC’s Pro/Desktop. It’s a simple package and not without its faults but when you consider the pace of technological development since then it’s appalling how much CAD has stepped backwards. Everything is clunky, cloud strangled, ribbon interface befuddled and runs like molasses.
I definitely couldn't replace Solidworks or Fusion360 with FreeCAD in terms of speed of use, especially if I was sitting down with all 3 for the first time.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
With that in mind, yes, FreeCAD doesn't have those features, but they exist in other open source applications.
I really wish that was true. It would make my life much better.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
I'm intentionally not. Because if I where I would also be talking about Navis, Infraworks, Revit, 3DS and so on.
And just to be clear I greatly dislike AutoCAD and if I never had to use it again it would no doubt improve my quality of life.
The problem is that everybody uses a different 80%.
"a good number of features that AutoCAD is missing"
Everyone needs a different bunch of features, and for some of them that would exclude AutoCAD.
AutoCAD was basically a UI for a pen plotter.
One notable exception was Duff Kurland. He liked hanging out with us users and would chat us up. He'd get our bugs fixed. We loved him.
Generic CADD was pretty good, much loved. So Autodesk had to kill it, natch.
Only Bentley's MicroStation was more user hostile.
Later, an intern at Bentley created an amazing auto snapping & aligning input tool. Especially for isometric drawings. I don't know came of it.
User interface researchers like Suresh Bhanavi did some really good work. He was hired by Army Corp of Engineers to determine why CAD work had poor quality and ROI (often negative), compared to just using drafting boards. He tried to advocate his findings. The CAD vendors weren't interested.
I doubt Autodesk or Bentley ever addressed their distain for users.
Gods, writing this now, I'm angrily remembering helping coworkers fix their SolidWorks and 3DS Max problems.
A few startups were more user and domain focused. ArchiCADD and Rhino come to mind.
Source: Was a CAD jockey in the 80s/90s. My "chaotic mutant user interface" critique (allegedly) got wide circulation within Autodesk. Briefly served on Bentley's steering committee; waste of time.
PS: Just looked at Autodesk's current product list. Wow. They're the Computer Associates / SoftBank of design software.
That said, there is a makers version of SolidWorks coming to the market this year.
Autodesk's present scheme seems to be to make as much of their software cloud-connected, with the purpose of entrapping all your company's vital IP within.
But it will eventually be good enough. For some things it already is.
KiCAD gave me hope. It is possible to have professional grade open source CAD software.
But it's definitely behind the curve in terms of how friendly and discoverable the user interface is. It's a powerful modeler, but I'm not sure that it's in a good state to be used by a large engineering team on multiple large projects. In particular, a lot of the PDM options for FreeCAD seem sort of questionable; for better or worse, a lot of organizations are going to need it to interface with their current data management software. I haven't seen the effort to do that yet.
It's ridiculously powerful, and the cost is about 1 cup of coffee per day. I'm running it on an $800 laptop that's a year old, and it's snappy. My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?
The CAM works, the simulations work, the assemblies work. It’s Cheap for what it is. I don’t even touch the sculpt, electronics, or sheet metal workspaces and those are included!
My personal bugbear is that the rotary 4th axis cam is so expensive.
Linux is not the most widely used desktop OS - that is windows by a long shot and that is the segment that matters here. Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
> Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
Why indeed? I disagree with "negligible" here, but for any sort of advanced and automated workflow, Linux is the best choice.
There's a learning curve, of course, for any CAD system. It takes WEEKS of regular usage to get reasonably fluent and even then you'll get snagged with a "how do I?" problem regularly. The hardest part is unlearning bad habits. There's easy ways and hard ways to do things. Sometimes the hard way is initially more intuitive, but ends up costing effort and time.
It's helpful, I think, to watch pros use it and see what they do. That's another good feature. It has a decent user community and there's lots of help available.
I've tried Fusion 360, and I agree, it is just such a pain compared to SolidWorks which I use for work. I already have a paradigm for design in my head due to how long I've used CAD and Fusion 360 doesn't match that. I'm somewhat surprised that Solid Edge isn't more popular in the maker space, it is similarly free for hobbyists and is legitimately CAD software that professionals use.
CAD is bad because there are too few users.
Work backward from the Altium statements. Altium has about $200 million in revenue. Altium website claims licenses are about $2K-ish. That's a maximum of about 100K paying users (reality is likely closer to 25K).
If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
CAD is bad because it is made by SW developers who implement requirements and have no idea how the SW is used. I do not need all the toolbars at once. If the buttons are too small they are difficult to press, if they are too big they eat valuable space.
> If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
:) Most of the features are used sporadically.
> In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
No. There is a workflow. During this workflow you may, or may not need special features depending of the object being designed.
> Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
There are some very good open source tools (like Magic layout system) but they are good because the developers also use those tools.
> The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
AFAIK there are no "CAD coders". There are SW developers who got the job to write the code. Finding people qualified in multiple domains is hard.
Sorry, the Magic layout system is NOT a good tool.
It has a lousy DRC/extraction system based on corner stitching which requires that everything be lambda-based rectangles. Ever seen a professional VLSI layout person use rectangles?--they almost never do. There's a good reason why they use paths.
Good layout systems also link the schematic and layout in real-time. A lot of PCB systems even do this now.
I can go on and on and on about Magic. None of it is good.
It's an incredibly intuitive and well designed 3D CAD design tool for beginner to intermediate complexity 3D printer projects.
For more complex design I'll use blender or onshape. I've tried Fusion and just find it too convoluted!
A year ago Altium positioned itself as the hobbyist friendly EAGLE alternative by advertising that they still sell affordable permanent licenses when Autodesk forced subscriptions down everyones throat.
Recently, they burned those bridges by insisting on subscriptions, making the cheapest license $10k all while still keeping the old advertisements listing a $2.9k price online. And for hobbyists, $10k is too steep.
I tried to reason with them, but to no avail. I know of several other people who had a similar experience.
Recently, the KiCAD nightly built has gained an almost flawless Altium importer, better OpenGL rendering with supersampling, and there's a patch in the pipeline that'll let KiCAD open, modify and display Altium documents almost pixel-perfect. And thanks to automated tools, the free offline-capable KiCAD library is now exceeding the scope of the paid online-only Altium vault.
I'd give them until the KiCAD 7.0 stable release expected to arrive in 1-2 years.
Well, you say this but as a KiCad dev I will say our library team is heavily understaffed and entirely burnt out. Very few library submissions have been processed in over a year. The automation is there to validate agaisnt rules but there's some that still need to be checked manually, i.e. actually confirming everything matches datasheets, etc. It's a thankless job.
SnapEda charges $60 for schematic, footprint, and a simplistic 3d model. KiCAD could offer the same service but with the added benefit that components are added to the library afterwards.
The librarians themselves are entirely self organized and basically work independently of the code base developers. They are generally not programmers at all (and don't need to be).
While there are some efforts underway to start slushing around the donation balance we have gained, it takes time when everyone is largely a volunteer with limited time.
Recently due to chipageddon and imminent production of our major equipment we have been reaching for some less common (but available) components. Therefore we've started drawing up symbols/footprints/3D models more regularly. Even basic stuff is sometimes not there. I naturally want to contribute back but noticed:
(1) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-footprints is now read-only on Github but had 336 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 412 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(2) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-symbols is now read-only on Github but had 217 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where is has 304 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(3) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-packages3D is now read-only on Github but had 75 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 93 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
Things I take from this: (1) Fundamentally the transition to Gitlab (which I support!) could have been handled better by KiCad, and this is harming community engagement - eg. you should either keep them up to date as mirrors of Gitlab or shut down the old Github repos and redirect users to Gitlab. (2) Gitlab requires SSH keys to allow cloning, which breaks for most scripts/automation (by design). This should have been considered deeply before the move with a strategy to mitigate the user impact. (3) The current de-facto UX of having to mystically discover a move happened, manually creating a Gitlab account, upload an SSH key and manually re-clone three repos in-place while preserving KiCad path configuration is a poor user experience to say the least, which less technical users will not be able to do, and should preferably have been handled automagically by KiCad itself using rsync or something.
Asking devs to validate submissions is insane. Instead, consider to invest some time to create an off-git unified submissions process which enables users to verify one another's uploads, sort of like a captcha, ie. "does this pin on this footprint match this datasheet?" or "do the overall dimensions of this package match this datasheet?". This would allow for submissions but require some community engagement on upload to lessen the load for existing maintainers. To make up for potential inaccuracy, just fire the same content at a few people to verify, or even hand out open source experience library helperships to students: KiCad summer of datasheets.
My 2c. Keep up the great work!
1. The pulls got copied over to gitlab.
2. Yea the gitlab library transition was not clean...technically it was never finished. Once we get to RC1 for V6. I myself hope to switch over fixing up all our web content instead of chasing down Windows platform bugs.
2. The codebase devs actually have no involvement with the libraries. The libraries are already community ran. The problem is most people would rather file issues asking for new parts rather than finding a way to help.
3. Most everyone is a volunteer largely except for the two that make money doing paid support which is a job in of itself. We can't organize interns because none of us have the interest in burning more free time than we already do.
4. The current mindset of the librarians has been _quality_. Because bad PCBs due to component issues can be expensive and time consuming problems. And issues with components will not only harm trust of the libraries but also KiCad
5. Could we develop some sort of less-gitlab-dependent web system? Sure. Do we have the engineers with free time to do it? Absolutely not in a million years. I dream of doing it, I certainly have the ability to but I need to have a life too ;)
The bigger issue is the industry, hardwarists can have little or no programming background or don't feel comfortable outside whatever low level programming they do. So I don't fault them but that's the hand being dealt. This is a niche industry tool with niche demographic.
The biggest obstacle here is to get everyone else to buy in, mainly the librarians....who I'm honestly not sure how to hunt down for a conversation. Core devs probably don't want to deal with anything major/new until v7 next year at this point.
KiCAD is far from perfect, however some industry familiars should be apologetic and embarrassed at how poor their offerings are compared to the open source equivalent (plural even, sometimes). I didn't spend a huge amount of time in Altium designer but, although I did like parts of the UI, it just seemed like a old codebase past it's sell by date with a pretty face slapped on top.
However, I did recently discover Horizon EDA, which uses the Kicad core, but is way way way way saner and easier to use. Give it a decade and it might be worthy competition. Though surely Altium is only really targeted at FTSE500 companies who need really advanced features and can easily afford $10k licenses. I don't see them using open source alternatives.
Anyway, I just want to big up Horizon a bit more because it's so so so much better than Kicad:
There's another tier of PCB design tools above Altium with matching cost per seat, e.g. Mentor Graphics Expedition. Unigraphics, for mech Es.
Both of the above owned by Siemens! They certainly know how to charge large sums of money!
For example, Chinese hardware startups selling through aliexpress tend to use Altium. But I don't think they'll buy many licenses. And I can't afford to. I really have no idea who would buy it, except for people who have old Altium files that they absolutely need to open.
We've greatly revamped the experience in KiCad v6 available as the current nightlies. Meanwhile I agree 5.1 and older are awful.
Well done if that attitude has changed though!
The negative externality of the public losing access to the tools needed to build and modify essentially all of technology eventually exceeds even the tyrannical rents that a monopolist or hedge fund can extract when the public suddenly has no other option.
Maybe proprietary software should be required to go open source after 20 or 30 years.
That might be a bit extreme but something like enforced export tooling and/or open standard interop might be feasible.
Also, you could pirate and run 90s software today if you wanted to. Almost nobody does (And it's not because nobody pirates software...)
It's also worth noting that Altium didn't say no. They said the offer wasn't high enough.
Capita, in the UK, has had a reputation for only growing through acquisition and not organically according to some commentators.
It took years until arduino-like tools got good enough to eat the mcu proprietary tools lunch. We're still a few years away until symbiflow does the same for fpga. But for markets where FLOSS can't penetrate, I don't see much hope.
Maybe I'm missing business 101, why would you want to give up some your large diamond to some other company?
1/ You don't see this as giving up your diamond but making it shine bigger and faster. You believe that your $3.9B valuation can grow faster with the help of a larger partner perhaps this is best for you and your investors.
2/ You have been running a company for some time and you are tired of running it or want to get out and "cash out" your hard work.
3/ You don't believe you can maintain a $3.9B valuation under future market conditions or upcoming competition and so you are willing to take the premium now (better for you and investors)
Just to name a few
Because you want $3.9B of cash instead of a company worth $3.9B.
Also funny since I would much rather have $3.9B in cash than a large diamond “worth” $3.9B, since diamond prices have been falling for many, many years, compared to alternative stores of wealth. And also, I would get zero utility from a diamond in the first place.
My guess is that Adobe didn't want to pay enough cash and was going to be using too much stock in the deal.
Altium would be a bunch of fools for not cashing out right now, though. KiCAD is right about at the level where it is going to start eating the bottom tier of customers. Even 1000 users lost would be a big hit to their revenue.
We'll probably buy one last set of Altium licenses to support current designs, but KiCAD 6 will probably become our default PCB software in the next year.
Unfortunately, this should probably be viewed as a negotiation on price. They certainly don't have the door closed.
very few sane organizations would ever completely refuse. everything is a negotiation.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if a company wants to advocate the case for proceeding as an independent entity, they will make it abundantly clear. This is not that.
certainly. i'd interpret it as though they consider the offer low, but within the ballpark, and aren't offended.
Autodesk probably dodged a bullet here.