2020-07-06 - House drawing 
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It has been nice and rainy this weekend, after a pretty long period 
of dry weather. And i used the 'indoor' time to reinstall some very 
old version of Autocad on my old WinXP computer.

I want to make a detailled drawing of my house in order to prepare 
some renovations i intend to do. And drawing my house has been on 
my todo list for at least a couple of years now. However, due to 
some severe procrastination i haven't done it yet. Maybe now it 
will change, and i can put myself to finally do it.

I always quite liked AutoCAD, as it is a pretty polished and well 
tested piece of software that has proven itself over the years. And 
as of yet i haven't found an open-source counterpart that really 
provides the same functionality. Librecad is nice, but still 
lacking here and there (try to do some fancy trims, and compare to 
functionality to early versions of Autocad)

However, that being said, i do not understand anything of the 
licensing models Autodesk is pulling these days. Currently 
everything is put in subscription models, where you pay a monthly 
fee to use the software. I bet, this is great for reducing piracy 
and to provide a steady income for Autodesk. The company would also 
argue that it's better for the end-user for all kinds of reasons.

However, in reality for the end-user this model - Also pulled by 
Adobe, and many other software builders these days - is total utter 
crap. The user doesn't actually own the software anymore to use 
whenever wherever, but only subscribes to using it for a short 
while.

With subscribing, the end-user immediately locks itself into having 
to keep paying for opening and modifying any of the drawings he 
makes with the software. If i have a subscription for AutoCAD 202x 
today, and i work on a really cool bunch of drawings, i have to 
again pay for a subscription again if i ever want to continue 
working on this drawing.

I bet this subscription model works for big companies (which are 
probably the clients targetted by Autodesk anyway). But for smaller 
companies and silly hobbyists like me, this obviously doesn't work. 

However, since the earlier versions of Autocad are already 
excellent for drawing in, i'm more than happy to use the 20yr old 
version of Autocad, which i still have laying around on a CD. And 
although it doesn't have the fancy newfangled features the new 
versions has, it still does a damn good job for my simple drawing 
needs. And more importantly, as it's on an offline CD it can be 
reinstalled it and used whenever its needed, without having to pay 
for it again and again.

Also, this 20yr old software is blazing fast on my 12yr old laptop! 
Honestly... Who needs all this new software anyway... I haven't 
even figured out all the features of this 20yr old software yet.

It seems weird that there is not a more active market for ancient 
software nowadays. For me, i'd be perfectly happy to purchase a CD 
of Adobe Photoshop 5.0 to do my photo editing. I bet some 20yr old 
programs will still have most of the features most of its users 
utilize anyways...So why buy into these insane subscription models?

If the Autodesks and Adobe's would offer to sell these 20yr old 
versions of the software at a discount price, i'm sure most users 
would go for the old versions.