Hacker News Reader

I agree, but Altium Designer really is very, very good and has been built over almost 30 years. Unfortunately FOSS tools come nowhere near it.

This. I've used a couple of packages and AD is at the top of the line. Design is a pretty difficult problem to solve which is one of the reasons FOSS, which is usually created by a limited amount volunteers in their free time especially for niche branches (i.e. not like a kernel for instance), has trouble catching up with the work of larger amounts of full-time paid jobs which are focused on just one thing.

Altium announced the intention to launch a lower-end tool (along with a new pricing model) a while back [1].

Presumably it's an entry-level product following a pricing model like EAGLE; limits to commercial use/board size/number of components/ layers/connections /schematic sheets.

[1] http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-designer-new-pric...

On page 2 there's "CircuitMaker will be free to start" and you pay for extensions to handle more complexity.

So it probably comes down to what is core and what is an extension.