Is KiCad open source?

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I often look at what is happening in the commits of the master branch of KiCad, because it is interesting to see what is currently being contributed, and from time to time I enter bug reports when I find something while working in or trying out KiCad.

Now, there was an interesting feature being committed yesterday, and I mentioned it here in a post in order to exchange some thoughts / share the excitement / exchange experience with others who might be interested in the same feature and try it out. It was then clearly said that I am not allowed to do so, until the official announcement is done in the new features thread.

Now, it seems a bit unintuitive to me, that repositories that are publicly accessible on the internet, and that at least on the surface seem to be presented as being open source, are not allowed for the “public” to discuss.

What is the project culture and policy of KiCad?
Is it / does it want to be open source?
I’m not quite sure, but I think to remember that a long time ago it was perhaps not open source? If so, does this still apply even if it looks like open source todya to a casual observer?

Just wondering and trying to understand things…

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It was said by a person who has no official affiliation with the KiCad project, and from what I remember he did not say that you were not allowed to do so, either.

KiCad is open source. However, KiCad being open source has nothing to do with the policies of any particular web forum. Nothing about it being open source would prevent the administrators of this forum, for example, from setting a policy of “users are not allowed to discuss the source code of KiCad” or “users are not allowed to discuss unreleased nightly versions” or anything like that.

Of course, no such policy exists and you are welcome to discuss these things. I just thought it was worth clarifying that this doesn’t really have anything to do with KiCad being open-source, but rather the decisions of the people who administer this forum. It is worth remembering that this forum is officially endorsed by the KiCad project but is not run by the KiCad project. It is also worth remembering that there are plenty of people who are on this forum a lot and post a lot, and who have strong opinions, but who are not in any official position. Their opinions only reflect their own views, not the views of the KiCad project.

Even I, an “official” representative of KiCad as a core team member, am normally only posting my personal opinions here.

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Thanks for your thoughts and clarifications on the issue.

I don’t remember exactly the wording of what was said, and can’t see it any more, but as I understood it, even if the exact words “not allowed to” were not used, it seemed that I should definitely not do so. I did not ask to get the detailed nuances of what was said, so perhaps I just went with the main gist of it and missed some detail…

Perhaps my idea is too simplistic, but to me it just would seem logical, that a forum that is meant for discussing an open source project, would allow discussion about what is going on in the development of the project…
But as you say, forums can set up any rules they want, and apparently people can have opinions and express them in a way that it is easily interpreted as being some kind of rule…

As previously, just my thougths…

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Yes, very much so:

That was your interpretation of a response I made to your post, I wanted to look up the words used, but someone else deleted the whole thread. Partly because you deleted the text from your own opening post, and maybe I was venting my own opinions a bit to strong too.

As craftyjon already mentioned, I am also just a user, I am also not a moderator although I do have some extra superpowers as a “level 4” user on this forum. My social skills have never been very good, and though my intentions are good (why else would I spend so much time and effort on this forum?), it also happens quite often (too often?) that people interpret my posts more negative then intended. For me it’s often guesswork what sort of response I should type (or not type at all, I’ve canceled quite a few of my responses because I did not find them good enough, or did not add much to a conversation). And sometimes I guess wrong. C’est la Vie.

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The thread made no sense with the opening post (title?) changed so I deleted it.

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Not too simplistic and perfectly logical. In fact, the one thing you can be certain is allowed on this forum is discussion of Kicad. :grinning:

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Maybe I can shed some light on this.

I used to have more time for KiCad, I used it more and I followed the development intensely. This can be seen especially in the thread Post-v5 new features and development news where I had something to say about most of small and large new features and also about what else was happening in the world of KiCad development.

I don’t regret what I did, but later I have seen that publishing everything what happens may cause some kind of inconvenience for the developers. They don’t have as much peace for their work as they might need. Especially when a large new feature is committed to the codebase, the developer may already know it needs this and that before it’s ready to be tested “reliably”. Publishing the brand new feature widely among end users right away when it’s introduced to the code base may lead to unwarranted criticism and some unhelpful bug reports.

Therefore, today I might be a bit more careful about announcing development news, case by case basis.

This doesn’t mean discussion about new features, whatever they are and no matter how some user have found them and tested them, would be improper. It just comes with the caveat that there may be known bugs and the situation may change in rapid pace.

Then there’s the other side to this. First, KiCad unstable development code base is meant to be tested. This is how the whole ecosystem works: new features are developed publicly in the “master” branch which is then built daily and published officially as “nightly builds”, and feedback is wanted. This wouldn’t make sense if discussion about it would be somehow discouraged or forbidden.

Second, there’s a kind of 2nd tier of new features which developers want to integrate to the code base but so that they don’t want to give an impression that it’s ready to be tested widely quite yet. A feature can be put behind an advanced configuration flag so that the feature is built in but is activated or revealed run time only if the corresponding flag is set in a special configuration file. So, if a developer really doesn’t want to spend time on public discussion or bug reports of some unfinished feature, they can commit it but make it “hidden”.

Third, there’s no better place for discussion about KiCad development without interfering the developers’ work than this forum. You just have to understand that if someone else than a developer answers here, it doesn’t have the same authority than a comment by the developer who is working on the feature.

In short: discussion is welcome, use your common sense, don’t expect new features being ready and polished when they are introduced or published. You can always ask in the forum. Don’t pollute the development mailing list or the bug database with questions which can be answered here. Be aware of the caveats of this forum – for end users by end users, only occasionally and unofficially by the developers.

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I think that eelik says (writes) it better then I could.

It also reminds me of:

Now go count the number of times that someone reported that one of the LED’s did not work, both on the comments on Hackaday, and in the youtube comments.

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There are a couple of places to post and discuss feature requests for future KiCad releases.

A good starting point is this user forum:

(read the first, pinned post)

You can also create an issue in GitLab, and mark the subject line with "[Feature request]* if you have a fully documented feature request: Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab

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Probably well meant, but not really to the point.

This did not start with a wish for a feature request, but about when and how to discuss new features already being added. From the opening post:

In addition to that. the thread linked to in:

is from 2018, that is now 6 year old and in the mean time KiCad development has moved from launchpad to gitlab.

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We also have some “protected” threads here, like the Post V8 New Features.
The Mods try hard to keep this as simple announcements and discussions are moved to new threads to keep this thread clean.

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