kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Element Green <jgreen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents, from someone who is all *too* familiar
with these types of discussions.

* Libraries and modules distributed with Kicad should be public domain for
maximum flexibility.  I would assume Kicad is meant to be used in a
commercial environment and I'd hate to have to create all my own libraries
for things as trivial as power pins.  Enforcing public domain for the
library/module content distributed with the program, I would think
encourage more participation from anyone using Kicad in a commercial
context (who would want to contribute content to a body of work they can't
even effectively utilize?).

* An online sharing database of libraries/footprints would be awesome.
 Licensing in this case could be flexible and definable by the author,
though I would think public domain should be encouraged.  I also spend a
large amount of my own time creating footprints and libraries, due to lack
or difficulty finding quality content.  If there was such a concise easy to
contribute to database, I would happily contribute to it.

* User contributed content could be extracted from this online database for
use in Kicad, provided it is public domain and follows certain guidelines,
which should be defined for a concise module and library resource.

This last item is pretty important in order to keep Kicad libraries and
modules consistent and the most generally usable in situations.  I often
end up creating my own libraries and footprints because of issues with the
ones distributed with Kicad.  Some guidelines and organization is needed to
really make it more useful.

Again, just some common sense from someone standing on the sidelines of
Kicad development.

Best regards,

Element Green