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Several years ago I advocated transitioning our academic robotics research lab to using Fusion 360 as our default for design. I regret that choice more and more with every decision like this. We are rarely affected by these changes on our academic license, but I hate to see students invest in a tool that may suddenly become unreasonable to continue using later.

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During my PhD, the lab invested a lot of software development effort into a closed-source robotics platform that was discontinued [1]. I will try hard to avoid closed platforms in the future.

As academics, I feel we should put in our best effort to use and contribute back to open-source platforms. It's not crazy to spend the first year of your PhD adding a feature to an open-source package if it will boost your research productivity for the next 4 years. It's also easier to work around limitations when you only need to run one experiment instead of producing a robust product.

[1] Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight, a RPi-sized board with onboard stereo cameras and GPS. The hardware was unbeatable at the time.

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