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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

FLOSS wasnt just about "free shit" in the form of programs. It was all about user ownership of their data and how they wish to do things.

These days, closed source is also closed formats. And with cloudshit tie-ins, sometimes even means you never even see your data. It's just <hands waving> in the cloud.

For example, the sooner you migrated from Eagle after the Autodesk acquisition to KiCAD, the better. Sure, KiCAD was less polished, but your data and way you work was completely open. If you stayed with Eagle, well, you bent over and took it.

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Did Eagle get worse after Autodesk bought it?

Eagle and Autodesk deserve each other:

"In spring 1991 the dongle protection scheme of EAGLE 2.0 had been cracked causing a decline of 30% in sales, while sales for a reduced demo version with a printed manual saw a significant increase.[4] As a consequence in 1992 CadSoft sent thousands of floppy disks containing a new demo of EAGLE 2.6 to potential users, in particular those who had ordered the former demo but had not subsequently bought the full product.[4] The new demo, however, also contained spy code scanning the user's hard disk for illegal copies of EAGLE.[4] If the program found traces of such, it would show a message indicating that the user was entitled to order a free printed manual using the displayed special order code, which, however, was actually a number encoding the evidence found on the user's machine.[4] Users sending in the filled out form would receive a reply from CadSoft's attorneys.[4][33] The act of spying, however, was illegal as well by German law.[4][33]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAGLE_(program)#Controversie...

Sheesh. I just remember later versions having a pretty astute anti-piracy scheme where newer versions had some kind of blacklist of pirated keys, with the key stored in the binary save file - files produced by a pirated copy couldn't be loaded by a newer version. There were pretty great tools for textual import/export though, so it was relatively easy to work around.

In January 2020, EAGLE 9.5.2 was discontinued as a standalone product and is only licensed to users as a bundled component with an Autodesk Fusion 360 subscription.

In 2023, Autodesk announced that they will no longer sell nor support EAGLE after 7 June 2026.

from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAGLE_(program)

Autodesk is phasing it out and merging it into their Fusion 360 subscription.

There is no cloud. Just someone else's computer.

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