Autocad costs that much because Autodesk behaves anti-competitively and has locked firms into their proprietary tooling / file formats / training and the firms have no choice but to keep paying them.

Their predatory behaviour towards the engineering industry is literally why I taught myself programming and switched to software development.

They are a prime example of why you shouldn't build your company around closed source proprietary software, but open source software that can be forked or self hosted in a worst case scenario.

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Dam. Finally someone else who did something similar. I also changed my focus into more GIS and programming oriented work because of AutoCAD being what it is. I like working on open source software because I don't suddenly lose all my work because I ran out of license or left my job.