> when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses
I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades.
(It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.)
Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use case.
Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.
I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades.
(It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.)
Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use case.
Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.