kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@...>]

Vesa Solonen wrote:
> It's at most up to Alfons to decide. See:
> 
> http://www.freerouting.net/fen/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7&start=0

So he's not excluding the possibility of opening it. Good !

With the Linux kernel, we once had a rather bad experience with
depending on a proprietary tool: the BitKeeper episode.

In my opinion, the lesson to be learned from this was that you
can't build something that's shared by all on a basis that
belongs to one and is subject to the whims and fate of that
person or company.

There was also the cultural disconnect of a piece of software
that cannot be altered and adapted being a central part of the
workflow of people for whom one of the main reason for being
involved is in fact the ability to adapt things.

> Anyway it is a fine piece of software and I must applaud Alfons for making 
> it available. I wouldn't want to see it getting "lost" for whatever 
> reasons and that's why opening would make sense sometime.

>From all I've heard, it's a great piece of software and I think
it would be good if we could think of it in terms of something
truly liberating, not as a golden cage.

> Last, but not least ideas from Kicadocaml should be considered too.
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/kicadocaml

I must say that I found this one very impressive. The layer
selection is close to what I would like to see pcbnew and the
push router goes in the same direction.

- Werner