Hopefully the injection of developer hours into the project may mean that V6 can come forward a little
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Personally Iām not worried about KiCAD, I am really just curious how such a volunteer based project is purposefully guided once paid developers enter the picture.
I mean, the more work you do the more weight your opinion has and the more influence you get in how to shape things.
Iām really not concerned that this would derail KiCAD or anything, itās rather the social/organizational side of things I wonder about. How consensus is reached and how this would need to be organized to make those contributions purposeful assets to the code and not just an extension for some branch that no one else is going to use.
From an idea/implementation POV there wont be much difference between a voluntary developer wanting to do something and a customer who pays a coder who does something else.
But from a leadership/organizational POV I guess coders who provide more time/suppport/code to the project than others are likely to influence the project more. Its in the nature of the ābeastā.
In the end this might not matter at all, as the code canāt be taken closed source anyway, so there is no real incentive there to put too much effort into programming commercially for the project beyound solving your personal problem. The only sources for coding resources will be users (private as commercial ones) who need a problem solved. They are not in for it to create the tool really, they just want a tool for their process to create an output. So sponsoring developers to write code for KiCAD under this paradigm will never lead to KiCAD being ātaken overā.
But it sure would be nice (or efficient?) if the efforts of everybody involved point into a common direction.
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So what?
Wayne is free to do with his life what he wants. He is free even to drop out KiCad development without giving an explanation to anybody.
I thank Wayne and the other developers for their efforts coding KiCad, paid or not.
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Allow me to say a few words here in defense of all those speculations about Digi-Key at least. There is no intention to commercialize KiCad in any way for Digi-Key, we are merely trying to help out a software that both ourselves and our customers are using. There are no plans of any kind to do any action that would threaten or push KiCad down any path other than what you developers have set. We have requested nothing from any of the developers other than maybe an explanation of where they would like to go.
As for the library it does not have a full time developer doing work on it. Many that helped develop it have moved on and there are only a few left that do work on the library as their part time effort when daily functions allow it. We loved working on it and will continue to do so as we get time. You could say this is volunteer work inside Digi-Key. We do have plans to continue to maintain and keep working on the libraries(both DK and Partner).
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Hi Jeremy, this is a user forum. Each forum member has their personal opinions that can be shared or not by the developers.
Only a few developers read this forum.
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Nice to know you are still following the forum and that Digi-Key continues to support the effort. Much appreciated.
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Thanks for taking time to share this. I know the dev team is closely aware and greatly appreciative of all your and Digikeyās support.
As this is a common misconception, there might be room on the www.kicad.com landing page to clarify the corporate position.
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My feelings from the weekend was that there was a pretty well aligned team, especially from the core devs. I had a chance to sit down with a bunch of them here:
As youāll see in the soon-to-be-released videos, Wayne specifically calls this out as his mission. There are always going to be choices to make in developing software due to limited resources; Wayne indicated he will be pushing the project towards a tool that hits the maximum amount of users, but has a professional focus.
I recommend watching the talks by Jon and Seth as well. They discuss the process of bringing in more developers and creating a welcome community so more people are likely to contribute.
I would urge everyone to give the developers (and heck, the other users on this forum) the benefit of the doubt in dealings around the future of KiCad. Discussion is of course encouraged here, but I am hoping the videos and the positive interactions that happened inspire in others the positive feelings that I got from KiCon. I will do my best to expedite the video so we can all share what was going on this weekend.
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Having met Wayne during KiCon a couple of days ago, Iām 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). Iād encourage others in a commercial setting to do the same. And as for Digi-Keyās involvement, I think @Digi-manās post explains it well, Iāll just add that I only got a very positive vibe from everything that is going on.
In general, Iād say the project is maturing and growing, the community is impressive, and I really like where this is all heading!
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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.
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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 itās 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.
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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.
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I think you misunderstood me. And I donāt actually understand what youāre aiming at really?!
Every post of mine up there comes to the conclusion that I donāt 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.
Thatās me being logical and reasoning for āno problem here, move alongā.
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 āgoing closed sourceā 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), thatās 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 ācloud computingā 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
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This is answered in a KiCon video. They want a fully Open Source stack, including hardware. I assume they need Open Source ECAD for that.
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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:
āI have too much money, and I love the projectā
He offered me a job, I still have his business card (didnāt connected the dots until now)
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Thanks, finally the 2nd post in this whole thread found an answer (as thatās when I asked this the first time) 
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Yes my job offer was to translate a design from gerber (if i remeber correctly) to kicad. Donāt want tor reveal much (common courtesy)
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Thinking aloud, you guys might want to get into more direct contact with Dave (the guy from youtube) as he didnāt appear to have a lot of info to go on by.
Heās got quite a following and from his first dabs into KiCAD to now seems to have grown fond of itā¦
Iām sure he can do a lot of good being sort of an ambassador for the project - you know, publicity and all that stuff.
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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 āpredictā things. Agree that he didnāt have much to go off of, but he likes calling things based on past experience. Iām sure weāll discuss on the show this week too and Iāll discuss my experience with him on air.
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