I looked at the press release a little, and it does't seem any more "free" than anything else we already have, except that you have to join their community to unlock the software. Even Eagle doesn't make you join their community for their "free" version, and gEDA and Kicad have been even more free (and sometimes more professional) than the give-away proprietary stuff. Plus, it seems to be a node-locked single-user license, limited to one license per DesignSpark member, unless you ask for an exception. Their privacy policy explicitly states that they'll use your personal information to spam you, too - information you have to give them to activate their product. It looks like EDA software is becoming such a commodity item that every's starting to use theirs as a loss leader to get people hooked into other aspects of their business - pcb fab, design forums, extended features, advertising. I'm reserving judgement on whether or not this is a good thing - competition is good, but fragmentation can be worse.
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Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] New (free) PCB software
2010-07-05 by DJ Delorie
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