I’m curious if there are any statistics (or guesses) about KiCad’s market penetration in Asia, specifically South Korea?
My guess is that is going to be hard to find any really accurate numbers on. In ‘help about Kicad’ there are about a dozen Korean translators listed. I’m not sure how up to date that info is but it would seem to infer some demand.
South Korea is an outlier in Asia, due to high salary levels. KiCad has become very popular in most countries out here, where a commercial seat costs more than the staff. (You don’t see the cracked software much these days)
I’m encountering a lot of folks using a hybrid of Orcad for schematics and PADS for layout. Old versions, some cracked some not. But the versions they use are so old I’m not sure they’re still even sold. It baffling.
Orcad cracks were common ~ 20 years ago
For some reason Eagle never caught on in Malaysia
Indeed. Cracked or properly licensed, I find it interesting that the local industry seems to have settled on a hybrid solution of two packages from different vendors.
That said, my main point with this thread is to find out if we have any idea how popular KiCad is in Korea. While the Orcad / PADS combo is very popular, it’s not 100% used. I’d like to know if KiCad is even a blip on the radar.
I’m trying to give advice to a local client about adopting a PCB layout tool other than the usual OrCad / PADS combo.
Heh, OrCAD + PADs combo is a little common in the US defense industry
Unfortunately I don’t think anyone has stats on KiCad “market penetration” for anywhere. We aren’t a commercial project and doing that kind of analysis actually takes a marketing and sales department.
I can say SK is at spot #20 in the list of countries visiting the kicad website. (China is in spot 3, Japan in comparison is in Spot 4, Taiwan is in spot #19) based on aggregated geoIP data in the last 24 hours
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I can see why the combo. My office bought Orcad long ago as my staff were familiar with it.
The schematic side was decent, big libraries etc, but the PCB side was buggy. I had some bad boards with orphan tracks.
KiCad beats the combo in following recent IPC standards, which PADS is too old to be aware of
Maybe some kind of voluntary reporting request during installation would be nice?
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We can clearly see our download counts through cloudflare aggregating geographic hits. That doesn’t do anything for comparing KiCad’s usage to every other tool in existence to give a “market pentration” number.
A hybrid software approach gives no cross-probing and no easy back annotation
I’m surprised there isn’t a (optional) reporter built in that reports country and KiCad version installed.
Would be useful to see how how many older versions are out there and how long people take to upgrade.
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Downloads from the official site is only going to tell a very small piece of the story. But I’m Linux-centric and think of ‘official’ packages. Windows? Who knows. That might be the lion’s share and the official site might be a good indication. But, a company can download one copy and redistribute internally.
Also, pro, semi-pro, hobbyist, experience level would all be useful.
My lab (US aerospace) historically has used OrCad capture for schematic and PADS layout. It isn’t easy, but you can import that OrCad schematic into the PADS schematic editor and get cross probing. Back annotation is apparently also possible through change notice files, but I’ve never managed to get that part to work for me.
This might have been true in the days when you paid for data by the megabyte, but these days, the effort of setting up proxies or caches and keeping them current mean that it’s not worth sysadmin effort. But I suppose there may be islands of poorly connected or even disconnected machines where “USB flash” net might still be in use.
It could also be used as a way to keep everyone on the exact same version. But, this is all guesswork on my part.
Depending on regulatory requirements such as being supplier to defense contractor there are the infectious DoD and FedRAMP requirements, where things such as cataloging software are mandatory, even if you are only supplying a single screw to a upstream contractor.
Other industries similarly have software tracking requirements and it’s eventualy tying into SBOMs.
I have worked for a large company where the issue was more about security. They kept internally a good selection of software which was allowed to be installed by the employees who wanted it. Of course it means more work for the IT department, but from the standpoint of security it’s better than letting people download and install anything. We are talking about thousands of people, so the alternatives would be either chaos or inhibiting productive work.
There’s actually a better reason why it’s hard to track downloads by IP whether or not a cache is used. It’s that in a large organisation there is usually one entry point for Internet traffic so you end up with one IP address looking like the origin of the traffic but it’s all coming from NATed hosts.
Most Asian countries don’t have anything like enough IPV4 addresses and heavily NAT their ISPs.
This is also why IP address blocking on forums is a bad idea, only a tiny minority of users will be on a static IP