Landlord notions of Intellectual Property protection have been around almost forever.***
oP hooked me up with a full, dongled version of PowerPCB to run on my '98 box. To run multiple seat configs back in that day, PADS only provided one key and all sessions had to be actively networked to the dongled machine. Good and bad there, you could use X number of sessions at any one time on a much greater installed base of CAD seats. Almost nobody was doing this level of work on an amateur basis in the 90s as compared to today, things really have been kicked into high gear by Rpi and the fruit loops.
At any rate, from what I've gathered in the past, I'll need a fully lic . . . erm . . . dongled package to do Gerbers for a PCB the size of the DiiMO/TwinSpark SE/30 adapter board. Is that still the case? What might the options be for getting a larger board made? It may need to be four layers as well, has anyone gone with either upscale option from SEEED or the like?
*** auto-tldr'd a mini-rant again. OOPSIE! Old timers will probably have heard this already, but newcomers may be interested:
IIRC the user group teachers had to boot the PhotoShop sessions sequentially on each machine while networked and then disable networking in order to move on the next machine to start that session in the classroom. Adobe didn't bother doing that with Illustrator in the day, but now to upgrade past my licensed copy of AI10 I'd have to rent PhotoShop in a Suite along with it too. That's never gonna happen, never used it, never will. As a licensed FreeHand user I had the chance to upgrade to MacroMedia's
FreeHand Graphics Studio which included
Xres so I stubbornly used that instead. Because Adobe never anted up with a similar deal on their cash cow for loyal users of AI and its related products, so far I've refused to even play with any of the many copies of Photoshop I've acquired on various HDDs in the collection. PTUI!
Gotta get into the GIMP!