Autodesk bought Eagle! If you haven't been living under a rock for the past week, you would have heard the news that Eagle was sold to Autodesk by farnell/element14. How do I feel about it? Well, that's what I'll be talking about in this post.

First reaction

The first reaction I had to this piece of news when I heard it was to think that that was awesome! I'm sure most of you who read my posts know I'm a hardcore Autodesk fan and the fact that Eagle is now run by Autodesk just gave me more reason to move to it (aside from the bountiful libraries). So, in short, I was quite excited about it.

Some time later...

So I gave it more thought as I contemplated switching from my daily driver software KiCad to Eagle. Then Adafruit released this awesome interview with Autodesk about their new purchase. It seemed to indicate that Autodesk will be making incremental updates to the Eagle software. I hope they improve on the UX a bit more and stuff but all that is going to take time.

KiCad vs Autodesk Eagle

Well, after thinking it through, I concluded that I will be sticking with KiCad for now. This is mainly due to the open source nature of the KiCad project which not many PCB software share. Also if I know Autodesk well enough, I believe they will be releasing a full edition of eagle with all layers enabled for students. When that comes out, I'll give it a look and update you guys on that. Till then, KiCad is still an extremely versatile and useful PCB design software.