Joining the Outlaws
Well I've done it now - decided to not renew my annual Maintenance contact on 26 November. I didn't realise the actual date had come and gone, put in a top-urgent SR, surprised at the slow response, till it came - 'can find no trace of a Maintenance contract in your name'. So from now on, the forum is my only lifeline.
I've been stuck on v23 for some time, since the off-on-off-on ability to Hide/Show entities within a Refedit session was finally withdrawn for v24, wrecking my workflow. New features since then have been of no relevance to my work, while complaints of unreliability and incomplete development seem to have increased, and American-corporate-style enshittifying monetisation takes root.
I'd be long gone, to Qonic or similar for 3D, if that a) was fully developed, b) had its intended offline (desktop) version available. Maybe coming back to my legacy Bricscad for 2D working drawings.
I quite like becoming one of the old-timer Brics Outlaws, though I'll never have the honour of still being stuck on v14, like our Jon.
Comments
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I still use v17 — but I'm not an outlaw, just old. I bought v25 because of the huge discount. I think that entitles me to use any version up to 26. I'll probably keep using 17 till they cart me away. No new tricks for me.
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I think I'm both, old and maybe becoming an outlaw as well. I started using Autocad V1.4 in the early 80's and have used various cad packages for 40 plus years since. I had been looking for an alterative package to Autocad in the late 90's for my private work and because it was about the time Bricscad was introduced, I purchased the first version. It was an Autocad clone, it ran autolisp and it's price was to good to ignore.
As the years went by, Bricscad grew from a clone to become a far better product (in my opinion) than that of some of the ones I had to use in the many offices I worked in over the years.
Each year features were added that made it worth upgrading until V20 BIM. Features like PROPAGATE, BLOCKIFY, PARAMETRIZE, VIEWBASE etc. were all ground breaking for a relative affordable cad package.
Then it happened, it got sold to a large corporation. My thoughts were that changes would follow and to me it seems it did. All the new features on V21, V22 etc seemed to be improvements on existing commands. Some of the new features were also built-in commands that were available as lisp routines from other forums. 'Exciting new user interface' was another name for menu changes and trying to find a command that was now in a different location. Unfortunately, we also got prices rises, *mandatory maintenance fees and seemingly, less new features.
*(in my opinion, mandatory maintenance is making users to pay for debugging the software that has been offered to soon).
Having said all that, I still think Bricscad is the best package on the market at present for the money, so much so that I took the offer of 60% off and upgraded to V25 after using V20 for the last 5 years. Sadly though, V25 and V26 toolbar icons don't work on my computer and I'm running with V24. My support request offered a 'work around' and to me, not an acceptable solution. It was then closed out.
Based on the feedback from this forum, it seems there are still too many problems with the new versions so it looks like V24 will be my last purchase.
If I could offer any advice to the single user or small business, it would be to buy a perpetual license as I predict Bricscad will go to the subscription model in the near future……..just like Autocad
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I'm staying on v14 as long as I can continue to make it work. And I will jump ship from BricsCAD for the same motivations that took me from AutoCAD. Though my fear is that Autodesk's policies will be universal in the CAD industry.
My history is that I said to the small company where I worked, that they should not upgrade the AutoCAD v12 seat they had at the time. By that time, upgrades to new releases of AutoCAD were not actually earning their upgrade fee with new features at each increment. And that they had turned to an upgrade policy where the fee was high enough, that skipping releases didn't have any financial advantage. This was essentially a subscription model, even if you didn't officially switch over to their newly created subscription plan. This certainly irritated the people like me, and prompted them to jumped ship from AutoCAD to BricsCAD.
When AutoCAD v12 had become outdated enough that we should upgrade at that first company, I suggested BricsCAD, even though it was somewhat buggy at the time. It was a much smarter investment than AutoCAD's unofficial subscription policy. We did purchase BricsCAD, and would upgrade to BricsCAD v14 Pro eventually. Initially, our failure to upgrade beyond that was because of financial reasons. Both because of the company barely existing, and because BricsCAD was rightly increasing its costs as it added new features. But, eventually my reasoning changed. The motivation to jump-ship from AutoCAD was Autodesk's licensing model. But that motivation was now essentially gone as BricsCAD adopted the same policies.
Concerning "Illegal", I hate that the pirate industry gets to serve a legitimate role when providing ways for legitimate users of older versions to continue to use their software.
-Joe
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I realize this topic is somewhat of a rant us old guys keep bringing up. But, I don't generally see our current generation being concerned over these things. For example, they are a generation that doesn't feel compelled to own the music they want to listen to, and instead they just rent it.
It is certainly an indication of broader political issue. They are more willing to tolerate others having greater power over their lives. Whereas, the WWII generation, reacted in such horror to both the Nazi and Communist efforts at control, that they are more resistant to giving up control of the things they owned. And that includes the issue of renting vs. owning software.
-Joe
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- Regarding the World War II analogy - hard times create strong people, strong people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create hard times, and so on. I'll let everyone decide for themselves what period we're in now.
- When Autodesk made Autocad expensive and eventually moved to a subscription model, alternatives started to appear and people moved to them. If Bricsad goes the way of Autodesk, I imagine people will make the switch again to these other alternatives and new ones will appear as well.
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I like that, no.1, aridzv, will use if I may!
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Well put. When Hexagon bought them out definitely had a bad feeling. I'm not having the issues (yet) that some of you encountered but that may be that I employ a simple old school work flow that doesn't rely on all the bells and whistles.
Still can anyone come up with a case where a big company takes over the lesser and it's hands down a better product in the end? You really think Netflix buying out WB is going to fix quality of entertainment? Different field but dynamics the same - price increase. Sorry I'm ranting again.
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quote: Still can anyone come up with a case where a big company takes over the lesser and it's hands down a better product in the end?
Rarely. But I think Sketchup improved when Google bought it, and became obnoxious only after they sold it to a smaller company.
I never used Keyhole or YouTube before Google bought them, so I can't say for sure whether they got better or worse, but it's hard to imagine anything better than Google Earth and YouTube.
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