With Version 6 – due next year – …
Well that seems optimistic. 
It’s a KiCad year (about 7 human years). (I don’t remember when and how it was calculated, this is the only reference I found: Back Annotation, again).
(EDIT: Oh, I found it. It was “kicad week” which was about eight weeks. The next release in 5.0.x series. An inside joke about planned vs. realized schedule.)
Go ahead and make your derogatory remarks. My unsubstantiated, unscientific, impression is that KiCAD is moving at a pace comparable to the commercial software development projects I’ve been close to. (And its long-term plans may actually be better organized than many of those commercial projects.) Estimates for software development projects always seem to be quite optimistic compared to the reality of executing the project, especially in comparison to hardware projects - and I’ll confess to being a poor estimator on several hardware projects.
A recent article, “Accountability is what separates a Software Engineer from a Programmer”, provides some insight into this topic. The experiment that correlated code quality to developers’ pay scales was especially interesting.
Dale
You probably have never been in a situation where your remark was meant to be humorous but it was taken as derogatory…
Yes, I know it was intended to be humorous. It provided an opportunity to point out that the KiCAD developers are actually doing a great job! In contemporary U.S. culture (and to some degree in many other cultures) it’s common for men to mockingly elevate their status by pointing to their peers’ shortcomings with humorous exaggeration and hyperbole. I’m sure sociologists and psychologists have studied this behavior in depth.
Many incarnations ago, while working for a satellite communication company, I briefly disrupted a satellite transponder while testing thru an adjacent transponder in the frequency plan. (Lesson: Run a final check of ALL the test equipment settings - frequency, power, modulation, etc - BEFORE you key the transmitter. Don’t expect to “touch up” the settings after you’re on-the-air.) At the next department meeting, with great ceremony, I was presented with the “Bird Killer” award. I heard about that incident for several months - as I recall, my salvation was a co-worker who “Failed” an antenna (at significant monetary and schedule expense) for a defective pattern, after unknowingly measuring solar noise reflected off the moon.
You learn to separate the valid criticism from the hype, and appreciate the creative ways it is sometimes expressed.
Dale
It’s good then that I don’t consider myself being in the high rank of peers of the KiCad developers. Otherwise I could have interpreted your interesting story as a sarcastic derogatory remark aimed at my, your peer’s, shortcomings.
Anyways, it’s exiting to know Wayne thinks that way. Even two years from now on would be short time. All the promised features (http://docs.kicad.org/doxygen/v6_road_map.html) within one year would be more than amazing.
But what is really interesting is this: “I don’t see any reason why KiCad can’t be one of the best – if not the best – of the EDA tools out there.”
This is an optimistic vision, but KiCad is going towards it, and I can’t see why there shouldn’t exist such an ambitious vision. We know examples from Open Source world - Internet runs on OSS, LibreOffice is viable alternative for many, etc. IMO the real question isn’t if it will be the most popular EDA or one of the most popular, but whether there’s enough criticall mass to make the development going fast forward under all circumstances. Like Linux on the desktop market. Not very popular in percentages, but completely competitive for those who want to use it and always getting better. And it has actually changed the competitors’ strategies, pricing and even ideologies. I think “one of the best” is possible unless before it some competitor comes up with easy autoplacing and autorouting which actually work.
That is a terrible article. It reaches conclusions not based on the referenced study, but pulled out of thin air. For example, no where in the study does it refer to “software engineers”, but “developers” or “freelancers”. The author also mistakenly thinks the fee is an hourly rate, it was the total fee. The author also says the study looked at 43 developers, it was 42. Did he even read the study?
To be honest, that article is rubbish. The conclusion he should have reached is that “if you don’t specify requirements properly, you get bad results”. How developers style their job title is irrelevant. But just in case, I will change my job title to “software genius” to ensure maximum remuneration.
All the study shows is that “you get what you pay for”, which is not news.
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