[Discuss] Fwd: [Open Manufacturing] Lady Ada interviews Autodesk after EAGLE purchase

Javier Serrano Javier.Serrano at cern.ch
Wed Jul 6 08:11:50 UTC 2016


[[not sure I have the right to send email to all these lists, giving it
a try anyway]]

On 07/06/2016 05:45 AM, Nancy Ouyang wrote:
> lolwut. Autodesk bought Eagle?!  
> https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/07/05/exclusive-interview-with-autodesk-about-the-cadsoft-eagle-purchase-autodesk-cadsofttech-technolomaniac/

Thanks for the link!

> yay for free 6 layer!

Free as in beer "to students and faculty for non-commercial work."

> in other words, go KiCAD go! i'm rooting for you :3

Thanks! The KiCad [1] project leader, Wayne Stambaugh, is actually
spending this week with us at CERN, working with 5 other people in what
turned out to be an improvised KiCad mini-hackathon. In my view, the
reasons to use Eagle over KiCad have very quickly shrunk to zero. As we
are preparing the roadmap for the next stable release, I would be very
interested in people's opinions about missing features and UI quirks in
KiCad.

We are also seeing a slow-but-steady increase in the number of people
who volunteer to contribute to KiCad development. If anybody here would
like to participate, please email me off list. We can use all sorts of
help, not only software development. For example, I think we could
really do with a user experience (UX) person. PCB fab houses also tell
us they get more and more KiCad files, and some are asking how they can
help.

For those of you new to the subject: the big difference between KiCad
and Eagle is that KiCad is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) [2].
KiCad gives you the same type of freedoms on your software as the ones
you get in hardware when you use a licence compliant with the OSHW
definition. In particular, there is no constraint on your ability to
copy, distribute and modify the software as much as you want. In my
opinion, a FOSS toolset is key to OSHW development. Only with a good
FOSS toolset you can guarantee that anybody will be able to open, modify
and share back your design files now and in the future, without any
artificial constraint. An open file format is only a step in the right
direction, and you get that necessarily with any FOSS tool.

If you are less into freedom and more into features, I invite you to
compare the feature list. One example: 6 layers free for students and
faculty for non-commercial work vs. 32 layers free for everyone to do
whatever they like, including of course commercial work.

I think it's a matter of time until most OSHW work gets done using FOSS
tools. The question is how long it will take. Please help us so this can
happen sooner rather than later!

Cheers,

Javier

[1] http://kicad-pcb.org/
[2] GEDA is another example of a FOSS EDA tool.


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