kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["manneveru" <manveru@...>]

--- In kicad-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...> 
> I agree with Dick on principal. Although I'm not sure I would have put
> it quite the way he did. Using proprietary tools to develop open source
> software projects can be risky. [...]

Compiler isn't a such big problem here, plenty open-source projects
delivers their binaries for Windows from Visual C++ (I think Python do).

> > But in my opinion, it is important that an open source program like
> > Kicad remain compilable with open source tools.

I agree in 1000% percent.

> You might want to take a look at the license for DialogBlocks
> <http://www.anthemion.co.uk/dialogblocks/faq.htm#license> that is used
> to layout most of the dialog boxes in Kicad. It is neither open source
> or free as in beer. I did a quick grep of some of the dialog sources
> managed by DialogBlocks and they were all created with an unregistered
> (demo) version of DialogBlocks. So even if there is an agreement
> (verbal or written) between the Kicad project and the developer of
> DialogBlocks, it can change at any time and require nearly all of the
> dialog boxes to be rewritten.

IMO DialogBlocks is an large issue for project like KiCad, this is not
a piece of software which I want to have on my computer. This is
probably result of specific situation with wxWidgets, where plenty of
external tools are commercial in nature. For example GTK has more open
sourced tools. And there is Qt (dual licensed, successfully used in
many open-source projects).

Michal