I wonder if the Altium sfw developers would prefer to be a bit lonelier as they head off to their daily scrum standup to talk about user stories and burn-down rates.
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I was laughing hard while reading the text on the above posted link.
Anyone that uses Nightly builds and follows the KiCad BugTracker knows exactly how fast critical bugs are fixed, and also how fast feature requests get implemented.
KiCad V5 is a pretty nifty EDA tool and I think is at a maturity level for most PCB projects; and KiCad is on the path to keep getting better.
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Haha, those idiot business types cannot tell the difference between open-source and free software. They fail to realize that open-source software is trademarked and, therefore, can enforce quality standards on admissible code. Failure to distinguish between free and open-source software is a telltale sign of ignorance.
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The risks of closed source commercial sotware, Altium could close down tomorrow and leave you locked into an unsupported tool. Even worse if the tool is a cloud based application that just stops.
If KiCad shutdown, the source code is out there on the official mirrors and has been built by 3rd parties - it could be forked.
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This highly depends on if your feature is of interest to a developer. There are loads of wishlist bugs (even with high user interaction) that have not been implemented for quite some time. It might be tempting for a business to sponsor implementation of exactly what they need if this guarantees timely implementation.
@Seth_h intents to offer this as long as the requested feature fits into the overall plan of kicad (So you can give your own feature request higher priority by paying for its implementation. This does not change the normal review process such a feature would go through)
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Let’s not forget what happened with Linux in the server market. Companies felt they were better off getting into supplementing the code base for WHATEVER reason they had in WHATEVER way suited their particular purpose. I can see Kicad reaching the same type of critical mass in its target audience.
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Maybe @ChrisGammell can setup anonym survey in this forum what visitors allows to click on choice for other EDA systems they have or had in use. As Altium enthusiats never visit the Kicad forum this does not give any numbers about market coverage but shows the approximate numbers of users who changed to Kicad or consider to do so while they use old EDA in parallel for compability reasons. For shure, there are many new “one time” users who never did pcb before and would not buy commercial licence but are now allowed to use EDA instead breadboards. Interesting would be the number of designs/year and reasons for change like OS incompability, expired licences or compatible/incompatible migration paths for designs and library. E.g. I know many users from Mentors Expedition who changed to Altium (including sales representatives !) and do not continue their Mentor license becouse of incompabilities from Expedition to Xpedition versions. Together of what we read in other and more general electronics and DIY forums e.g. about the changed Eagle licence policies gives minimum some numbers of growth directions.
To compare: What was the number of sold KiCon Tickets ?
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