Re: SolidWorks is cool, sort of (but FreeCAD might be better)

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 01:57:33 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

On 6/17/2025 6:49 PM, Sergey Kubushyn wrote:

Especially when you are not even able to BUY that software, only rent. Not
just it gets extremely expensive after couple of years like it is now with
e.g. Altium Designer -- its cost PER YEAR is now the same as I paid for my
PERPETUAL license when those were still available and "subscription" was
(still "is" for me as mine only expires in 2027) something like 1/4..1/3 of
that and not mandatory. The biggest problem is what are you going to do when
the company goes bust (it is not "if", it is _ALWAYS_ "when" -- the bigger
they are the harder they fall) or just decides they don't want to support
that outdated weirdo anymore when they have a newer one or suddenly want 10x
last year price...

>
PC-based CAD/EDA tools have always been a gamble.  The market is too small
and the customers don't want to pay for ongoing support/development (the
"I can do all that stuff myself" econo-mentality).
>
I dropped ~$15K on the DASH suite in 1986.  Where is it today?  (where was
it in 1990??)  PCAD, Protel, OrCAD, Cadence, DIPtrace, etc.
>
[Sad as STRIDES was one of the slickest tools I've used!]
>
OTOH, you could have purchased a Mentor Graphics workstation and still
be running PADS.  Is Computervision still in business?  (does anyone
maintain their hardware?).

We use PADS, Logic and PCB. It works fine. It's made us a couple of
hundred million dollars sales, so its cost is in the noise.

We've used it since the DOS days when there was basically nothing
else, and never bothered to get something else. We will if we have to
some day.