Free, libre, or what?

One of the biggest changes for the end user that came out of the acquisition of SketchUp by Trimble affects the licensing of SketchUp. Google saw SketchUp as a tool to enable everyone to produce content for Google Earth, and Google being Google, they could also afford to give it away for free to everyone.

Unfortunately, Trimble had other ideas, and one of the first changes was to discontinue the free SketchUp edition for professional users. You can still download and use a free version (since 2013, it is called SketchUp Make), but you are not allowed to use it for commercial projects. This is good because it still allows everyone access to a fantastic tool to realize their dream projects and to learn and test the software without the need to pay for a license. It also pushes SketchUp as a professional tool back among all the other commercial software that promises quality and efficiency for a price.

In the previous edition of this book, good arguments were made for the...