Having met Wayne during KiCon a couple of days ago, I’m very happy with the announcement and the increased involvement. Large projects benefit from a full-time maintainer, especially an experienced and reasonable one.
As for commercial use of KiCad, I talked to Wayne specifically about that, and tried to provide a different perspective on some things, as it is not always clear to developers how commercial users view and approach software (if you develop and use something every day, you are very different from a company where engineers come and go, and someone might try to open a project after a year). I’d encourage others in a commercial setting to do the same. And as for Digi-Key’s involvement, I think @Digi-man’s post explains it well, I’ll just add that I only got a very positive vibe from everything that is going on.
In general, I’d say the project is maturing and growing, the community is impressive, and I really like where this is all heading!
I would bet that Mouser will follow. I just successfully completed my first PCB. For my second project I will use the Digi-Key footprint library. My second project will be much easier.
If anything , I see a professional focus as stabilizing and making more explicit the design direction of the software. Commercial users do not want to revalidate their designs with many small breaking changes. I think the concern of targeted development branches for single customer/users is unfounded because it’s basically the opposite of what a commercial user (of which I am potentially one but currently only using for personal use) wants. As it stands now if I was using kicad for commercial purposes the change from version v4 to v5 alone was a month or so of revalidation of existing design, I would want to be sure that the changes are stable and not liable to change . Additonally, knowing that the project has full time developers, a professional user base, and formal support from CERN only strengthens the argument for commercial users to adopt the platform, which compounds the effect and brings more resources to bear
Personal users may see the impact in the form of slow adoption of major new features, but in the long run this will help everyone as those features will be better designed and validated
@Joan_Sparky your concern is real, but at this juncture it is speculative and makes some assumptions about the motivations of individuals and organizations. Until a specific problem is identified that impacts hobby users over commercial users I think having full time developers is nothing but a huge net positive for everyone .
What I am most excited about is bringing commercial users in the manufacturing space into the fold. If KiCad can even start to encroach on the market dominated by $100k+ software suites like mentor and valor for production tooling, that would be huge and KiCads value proposition grows exponentially.
Completely agree. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to do something like KiCon. Bringing everyone together and talking about what it will take is a good first step and I was appreciative that many of the manufacturers were there and giving candid opinions on how far along we are. I will try to post the manufacturer panel tomorrow.
I think you misunderstood me. And I don’t actually understand what you’re aiming at really?!
Every post of mine up there comes to the conclusion that I don’t see any dynamic possible (in good or bad faith), that would lead to KiCAD changing what it is and how it works or what it can do.
That’s me being logical and reasoning for ‘no problem here, move along’. Hell, before that post I commented in the youtube comment section at every possible instance that KiCAD is GPL licensed while people where implying that this would lead to KiCAD ‘going closed source’ and whatever else and at the same time promoting this support forum for anyone that appeared to have genuine problems using or adopting to the software.
I am really just interested in the process of how the development process is coordinated between all those stakeholders to make the most out of it (efficiency of development time invested), that’s really all.
PS: Asking for the motivation of WIT is completely driven by curiosity, as I went to their website and except for them being a ‘cloud computing’ business not much relevance to KiCAD is apparent to me.
I can 100% understand any hobby or commercial user, I can understand Digikey, I can understand CERN.
Their motive is clear.
But WIT? I have no clue.
I was not implying anything. I want to understand, to learn. Because that is what drives progress and gives us experience
Funny enough, I think this all started at Fosdem (after the Kicad talk)(I was present when the wit CEO started talking to Wayne, but leave shortly after).
I can distill down the motive as such:
“I have too much money, and I love the project”
He offered me a job, I still have his business card (didn’t connected the dots until now)
Thinking aloud, you guys might want to get into more direct contact with Dave (the guy from youtube) as he didn’t appear to have a lot of info to go on by.
He’s got quite a following and from his first dabs into KiCAD to now seems to have grown fond of it…
I’m sure he can do a lot of good being sort of an ambassador for the project - you know, publicity and all that stuff.
Dave is my cohost on The Amp Hour, we talk every other week and know each other well. He greatly enjoys stirring the pot and loves to “predict” things. Agree that he didn’t have much to go off of, but he likes calling things based on past experience. I’m sure we’ll discuss on the show this week too and I’ll discuss my experience with him on air.
Dave has a successful site but I’m not sure he is really that much of an influence the average user there. I’m not dropping coin on Altium because Dave prefers it. It’s not the type of site that will attract people that can’t make their own choices. I haven’t been to the site lately but when I did go on a regular basis I could go days and weeks without reading one of his posts.
Whats happening to Kicad is exactly what happened to Linux. Linus Torvalds was a paid employee of various companies and always seemed to spend his time working on code. Red Hat and others repackaged linux and made money by selling support. Its a good thing.
Red Hat also gave Linus $20,000,000 in stock options when they went public out of gratitude. Maybe Wayne is hoping for something like that.
For everyone that wants to start a bit digging who that guy behind Wit really is.
He has co-founded Digital Ocean (as Lead Architect). Also he has supported KiCon without even being mentioned as a sponsor. I believe Jeff is serious about supporting KiCad get to a new level. He is an open source evangelist and whatever he is funding at this moment pays 100% into open source hardware and software stack. Wit as far as I understood is his vehicle to fund that.
On another note: I do believe there are a lot of commercial beneficiaries (e.g. us, AISLER, a prototype manufacturer) and I think we have an obligation to fund KiCad developers so that the project can be sustainable. Digi-Key (cc: @Digi-man) sees it the same way. (and while we work professionally on this, we encourage our employees to get involved with the project also in their free time). We genuinely believe the more commercial players (and that’s most likely distributors, part manufacturers and contract manufacturers) support KiCad with donations, the easier it will become to make it a de-facto standard and the best PCB Design Tool on the planet.
Daves background with Altium is that he used to work for them so he had the software anyway and it is what he has always known. He got a PCB to review that was designed with KiCad and wanted to experiment and add ground and VCC layers so he had to work with KiCad again and started to realize how much it has progressed.
The forum caters for talk about all of the main ECAD packages with sub categories for each one.
