I don’t know what to think about this…
I will say this to be as reassuring as I can: we aren’t stopping development in the eagle code base this year and we won’t be complete with the complement of features in Fusion that would signal eagle’s waning capability until well-into next year.
If I had to guess, we wouldn’t be ready with that for a year and we would take another year to really encourage the migration.
Count me as unsurprised.
I’m a former Eagle user who switched to KiCad because of the Autodesk acquisition. I have four PCBs I started a while back using Eagle 7, but got shelved for lack of time (typical hobbyist problems, eh?). Just for fun I tried importing one of these partially-completed projects into KiCad 5.99 and was surprised how smoothly it worked. I’m going to experiment with it a bit, but I may end up finishing them using KiCad.
“I wouldn’t imagine we hold out forever maintaining two code bases that become ever-more divergent.”
That says everything.
Bye, bye, Eagle. Especially for Linux people.
Welcome Kicad?
Yea they’ve planned to kill off EAGLE for 2 years now. They are heavily pushing it into FUSION 360 where they can screw you over at a whim by banning you or deleting your account along with your content.
Unfortunately KiCad’s EAGLE importers are in dire need of improvements. They are not written too well compared to how they should be 
Eagle importer poorly written? NO WONDER.
I’ve been using Eagle format to pull boards back in from taking them through DipTrace for a bit of autorouting. >.<
Hello,
I think integrating eagle into a bigger suite makes perfectly sense.
Whenever I encountered eagle in a company it was not because it was the best EDA on the market but because the engineers, technicians and students already had a copy at home. No migration, no time delays.
But now eagle has become unattractive for privat use (for ME 
), especially as KiCad is getting really mature and imports eagle projects !
Now Autodesk needs a more professional and of course costly way into company purchasing.
And I agree, Linux will be the first casuality of this development.
Autodesk is trying to compete with the likes of Siemens with their grasp on the entire ALM/PLM process
Mentor Xpedition ( now Siemens EDA ), Polarion, NX, Teamcentre …
Being able to manage the ALM/PLM process is extremely important especially in reducing errors associated with handover and cutting development time. If you are not some massive company that can afford the suite (or afford that single supplier locking…) what do you do? Cadence doesn’t have anything, Altium does not… Autodesk+Eagle brings some benefits.
I wonder what route Freecad has considered for PLM, I wonder what would be involved in kicad support for that
Then help the developer by careful testing and submitting useful bug reports.
KiCad has improved in leaps and bounds since 4.0 launch days because the developers fix existing problems as priority compared with just adding new features
cough I am one of those developers
The eagle import was written a long time ago for EAGLE 6. It also deserializes directly to kicad objects rather than to an intermediate representation first which makes it weirder to support some of the newer EAGLE > 6.0 features where they cross reference entities by name.
The CADSTAR and Altium importers are very much on point with the “correct” structure.
One day I will go to town on the EAGLE importer if nobody else does.
You are in stealth mode. If you want, you might be able to get @ChrisGammell to add a Ki bug (i.e. developer badge) to your avatar.
True that. Flair added!
@ChrisGammell Wait… we get flair for contributing to KiCad? Is there a minimum contribution to get flair?
There aren’t any published minimums. At the beginning, it was just a matter of getting the lead devs flaired. I’ll let the @KiCad_Developers decide who should have flair otherwise though.
Altium is part of the Solidworks PCB package, it has been on the market for about 3 years.
https://www.solidworks.com/product/solidworks-pcb
ahh there we go
so there is the Mentor:NX, Altium:Solidworks, Autocad:Eagle
kicad does something comparable with freecad
Autocad isn’t paired with Eagle.
It’s just Fusion 360 which was paired with Eagle, now they are making it part of Fusion 360 for all those sweet vendor lock-in benefits (for them)
The KiCadStepUp tools are a great bridge between KiCad and FreeCAD.
I think one of the primary differences between open source tools (not just KiCad) and proprietary tools is the proprietary tools are much better integrated.
for better or for worse…
It would be better to have an open format, not just the final exchange (STEP) but for the design (constraints). Too much integration like that results in vendor lock-in meaning they can start holding your data hostage as they know to migrate isn’t worth the cost of increasing the entire suite by an extra 10%
you should be using a tool because it is the best for the job not because you have no other choice… open data exchange means companies need to innovate, fix things, provide value for money rather than just just sit there knowing they have your IP locked in their IP
Good Eagle import is strategically important for KiCad, AFAIK it has been so when Autodesk changed the licencing, and probably it will have a spike again when Autodesk starts pushing the migration (more aggressively). KiCad should be prepared well before that.
IMO the importers should be detached from the release policies, it should be possible to change an importer radically or even add a new one even for bugfix releases. They don’t add or change functionality of KiCad itself and they should follow the external file format requirements when they change. I don’t know if there’s any fixed policy for that at the moment.
It’s possible to write an importer as a python plugin, at least for pcbs. When eeschema gets it’s scripting API we will be all set.
I agree that maybe importers shouldn’t be part of the kicad binary and tied to it’s release cycle but only after all existing importers are extracted as quality first-party supported plugins.