Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

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.