Curse of subscription software

I've got one simple rule about software: Absolutely no subscription software. Absolutely no exceptions, ever.

Sometimes this makes my life more difficult, like now I'm stuck with Photoshop CS4. Hell, I'll rather learn to use GIMP before I submit to handing out money to Adobe every month, for ever. The monthly price might sound low but accumulated over years and years, it gets stupid expensive overall. Repeat that for every single software you use and suddenly you are forever tied to paying for essentially nothing new.
And this is ignoring the fact that software companies do die occasionally - and when license server shuts down, suddenly you will have nothing for all that money spent. Unless you are willing to break several laws to crack that subscription-based prison.

In my case it also helps that I've never been into newest features there is, so I don't have to have the newest, shiniest thing there is.

Latest case here is EagleCad. Ten years ago when I was shopping around for CAD software, I ended up with Eagle, version 4 or 5 I think (IIRC, it was version 4, but my license included free upgrade to v5 that was published very shortly afterwards). Open source offerings were not mature enough and other paid software was ridiculously expensive.

Last year I upgraded my Eagle license to version 7, which was very much worth it due to several new features, and so far I've been happy with that.

And then Autodesk came along and decided to make it subscription-based. Well, fuck them, Eagle 7.7 will be the last version of Eagle I use. Since I've learned eagle pretty well and I have no reason to go shopping for alternatives, I haven't, not yet. But I've been told that open source ones (KiCad for example) have grown mature, so at some point I may have to start learning them.

There's just two major issues; old designs (in case of some updates) and component libraries. Component design (in Eagle, and  with other CAD package either) isn't very difficult, but for larger devices (say past 100 pins/balls) it's pretty labor-intensive to create, check, double-check and triple-check all pins. If I were to change CAD package, I would have to do all that work again. And that would - will - suck, when I get there. Not anytime soon, I hope... Although come to think of it, I might as well get started now, when there is no pressing need to. Less stress later on.

Now, unfortunately (and very likely by very deliberate design) Autodesk has removed all older Eagle versions (that is, versions that are subject to subscription slavery) from download pages. And I didn't have a copy (aside the one I have installed) anywhere as backup. But it seems that they've (at least for now) forgotten about the FTP site which is still up; so if you want to get copy of 7.7, go there now and get your backup copy before they get rid of that, too.

ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/program/7.7/

One last scenario:

"Oh, the software you use is now obsolete so we shut it down -- but hey, you can upgrade to this newer, better, shinier PRO-version, it's just $19 more per month!"