I just want to bring this reply back into focus, especially for the OP ( @joniengineer ). The discussion around the GPL is interesting but fundamentally it is legalese. There have been instances in the past where unscrupulous companies have “sold” a FOSS piece of software and have modified it to brand it.
I wonder if Kicad.info needs something like what GIMP does.( GIMP - Selling GIMP). In the distant past some entity did this with GIMP.
And remember selling FOSS isn’t against the license, especially since there are costs associated with managing and distributing software. Its how it is done that matters (this is why I donate to Kicad: money, support and code)
Selling is not relevant. Even if you give away the binaries to modified GPL software, you have to make the sources available too.
There are some interesting tactics out there. For a long time, RedHat was providing patches for their modified kernels. Oracle was taking them and building their RH compatible kernels for their workalike Oracle Linux distro. RedHat then took all the patches for a given release and bundled then into a megapatch, still satisfying the letter of the GPL, but making it harder for Oracle to reverse engineer those changes.
I feel like a lot of the discussion that goes on in this thread misses the mark. It’s far too techincal for Joni’s questions.
To respond to the spirit of the question:
KiCAD is open source software and is free to use for anyone for making PCBs and schematics. There is no “paid version” or subscription. You are encouraged to support the developers if you can so that they can continue working on KiCAD and everyone can benefit equally.
You can use the PCBs and schematics you make with KiCAD in any way you want that doesn’t break laws (like building weapons if your country prohibits that) (of course you shouldn’t break your local laws).
The videos on YouTube are all made using the same version that everyone has access to. There are even “beta” or “developer” versions you can download and use that include soon-to-be-released features, though those versions tend to have some unknown bugs.
I read that reply, and it completely ignored the 3rd question. I attempted to offer a complete response that does not assume any preexisting knowledge of general or specific open source licensing. I also did not imply (or at least intend to imply; thus my follow up comments in parenthesis) that the license prohibits illegal activity. That’s you reading into it and seemingly conveniently omitting the context of my comment with your selective quoting.
This reply is exactly the type of off topic noise I was attempting to cut through with my original reply to the OP. Thank you for proving my point.
