ask @LightBurn 
Funny you should say that because I truly do a lot of reading and a lot of research.
I’m speaking of large platforms like YouTube that broadcast to large audiences. However there will always be exceptions as with anything of people disliking GlowForge and letting it all out. My point is that most (former/current who have upgraded) from a GlowForge to a gantry CO2 with Lightburn are civil and diplomatic in saying that they outgrew the machine that had served them well up to a point rather then slamming the company. Maybe it is because they made a large investment in a machine that at the time was the only “user friendly machine” as compared to EZCad2 interface.
Here are a some of many on YouTube saying that GlowForge worked for them until it did not:
@RalphU i understand the concept of being driven by inferiority in order to create perfection as @LightBurn was. You are preaching to the choir on that point. I am absolutely grateful to GlowForge for without them there would not be my beloved Lightburn.
Here is an example of another person that was been driven by perfection to create better, Lamborghini vs. Ferrari:
Do I think Lightburn is the Lamborghini of laser software? ABSOLUTELY YES!
In the famous words of Ferruccio Lamborghini Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI who was the Italian automobile designer, soldier, inventor, mechanic, engineer, winemaker, industrialist, and businessman who created Lamborghini Trattori in 1948 and the Automobili Lamborghini in 1963, a maker of high-end sports cars in Sant’Agata Bolognese he said: “A Lamborghini has to be beautiful, fast, comfortable, luxurious and fun to drive; it has to be the best GT ever made”
AFTER all they both start with the same letter and look great in red 
Cheers
Sas
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That must be the Australian attempt at a Lamborghini in the 60’s. The steering wheel is a dead giveaway.
Fine logic… you can find the history here…
I think you should think Ruida or maybe even grbl, for the development of Lightburn…
Glowforge had nothing to do with it as far as I can tell, they went crowdfunded about 2015 and Lightburn, as far as I can find, filed in late 2017…
I doubt Glowforge has much to do with the success or creation of Lightburn.
Only Lightburn could advise us of what got them here…
I get your points - they are valid. But, I used to read a lot of messages on FB and the official Glowforge forum on the Glowforge website. FB messages were much more negative towards Glowforge. You have to be a Glowforge owner to post on their website forum, so most of their disgruntled owners are pretty tame.
One thing you left out is all of the non-Chinese laser owners like Epilog, Trotec, Universal Laser Systems, and GCC LaserPro. These machines have been around for 20-30 years, way before Glowforge or Thunder, Boss, Aeon, OMTech, and all of the diodes. They still have a large market share for bigger companies, but the Chinese lasers are making a big dent.
The Chinese laser manufacturers I mentioned wouldn’t have sold nearly as many units if it wasn’t for Glowforge being slow and unreliable, and Lightburn. I think Lightburn was a bigger factor in increased sales for Chinese lasers. Thunder, Aeon, and Boss are a success today, and they owe most of it to Lightburn.
I started my laser journey back in 1980, with a non graphic monitor and a CAD system that was command line driven. We had a 48" x 96" laser, and our large format plotter was our “graphic monitor”
When I retired, I started going to a makerspace at my local library. There was another member of the makerspace that wasn’t retired, so he couldn’t get as much laser time on Saturdays as he needed. So he bought a K40, and didn’t like the software that came with it. He decided to write his own, and it became K40 Whisperer It doesn’t have the “bells and whistles” of LB, but a lot of people use it.
That makerspace had ordered an original Glowforge, but it took too long to deliver, so they bought a Universal Laser Systems
Find out more from the man behind the curtain
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Thanks… don’t have time at the moment… thanks for the link.
Why, are they making a big dent is the question.
Here is your answer:
Trotec uses their own proprietary software and Epilog uses Corel Draw. Nothing beats Lightroom.
Thank you for sharing your laser experience. Love learning from veterans in the field.
Supply and demand always moves or stops the markets. In your case Glowforges lack of supply affected the purchase and rerouted the purchase to a better machine.
If LightBurn went to some kind of Cloud based system I would keep my current version, if that was not possible I would look for different software, if I could not find anything I would abandon my Laser.
I will NOT use a cloud based software!
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I’ve lost expensive CAD software due to licencing on the cloud (Alibre) and I’ve personally seen enough software companies come and go I’d not pay for software that was fully on the “cloud” (just another word for someone else is in control)
It’s very convenient for certain things, especially if it’s free or very cheap, such as Email or software you occasionally use such as box designing software, but I’d not base a business on it.
Personally, I’d really like to save my settings into a kind of cloud service. Not the full software and working offline should work as well, but it would be great to have kind of “save settings to cloud” and “load settings from cloud”. This would be very handy to keep the LB configuration similar on all my machines (I do a lot of testing and use LB on two windows machines, a Linux machine and a Mac). If I add a new laser model etc., it would be great to just do the config once. I don’t like creating a config backup and transferring it manually, because of local paths etc.
Please NO!! Never cloud based. Too many horrible memories of dialup access, and while we do have MUCH better access these days, the 'net does go down sometimes. I like my software on my desktop.
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Can’t Google drive/desktop be used for this?
The reason why I don’t like cloud comes from my experience with Autodesk. Autodesk 123D was cloud and they pulled it with little warning. Fusion 360 is cloud and they limited the hobby license to 10 models.
However you have to lay blame for those changes on us, the users. Recall the days of hacked Autocad copies? Businesses were using the Fusion 360 hobby version. Many companies now control licenses in the cloud, example being Alibre. So when users don’t pay companies add controls via the cloud. Since I have little faith in users to not cheating, I think some control from the cloud will happen like it or not.
To be fair, the kicker was when I learned their software was ONLY cloud based, and they wouldn’t allow you to use the maxing without a network connection. That ended it for me.
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I don’t think many on this site would own a Glowforge. It’s way too controlled by Glowforge in many way, also only 40 watts I believe.
However we are not the target customer for Glowforge. They and many other companies who play in this craft space are trying to reproduce the Cricket model. Those customers don’t want to learn software, they are only interested in the art and a possible business.
How many times have you read that someone who has a laser on order and downloaded Lightburn to learn it while the unit is being shipped? There are a bunch of potential users out there who don’t want to learn the software. I think that’s also what this cloud based printer I just bought is trying to do. Super simple but wicked smart software (SSWS) is the ultimate goal.
Which is the real horror story: when the software stops behaving as advertised, for whatever reason, those customers have absolutely no recourse.
That said, consumer-grade lasers get sold with the promise they’re so easy to use you can just set them up on the dining room table and effortlessly create glorious artwork.
When those machines don’t work as advertised, the hapless customers have no recourse, either.
However, around here we can at least guide them toward the start of the long & steep learning curve required to learn enough about software, hardware, firmware, configurations, materials, and all the other “engineering” details required to do what they want.
I can see benefits in both approaches, but … if you’re gonna end up in hard mode either way, you must have access to all the intricacies required to make the thing work.
Can you elaborate on this. I thought Alibre specifically was not cloud-based which was a draw and offers a lifetime license in addition to their subscription model. That would be disappointing if either of these were not true.
Originally when Alibre came out many years ago you got 3 seats, then it was bought out and changed name (Geometric?), at this point the new owners converted the licences to on site and non transferable and shut down the original licencing server (we were given plenty of warning). So as my laptop and one computer failed I lost my working copies.
It’s now called Alibre again and you only get one seat. I still had a seat of the original Alibre working until recently so I decided to get the latest Alibre Atom as I wasn’t getting on with Fusion 360 and it was on a very good offer.
This is a very broad outline and I’m not sure if I’ve got all the facts right or in order
Edit: It was the licence that was on the cloud, not the software, but it amounts to the same thing once the company has disappeared.
Steve