kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Javier,

Thank-you for your email, it's very exciting news for KiCad.

I have already got projects underway using the CERN Open Hardware Licence.
That is a great initiative!

It's really nice that you've put so much effort into explaining where you
are coming from and what you are prepared to do for KiCad. Thank-you for
taking the time to put the email together and letting us know.

It feels like exciting times ahead!

Best Regards, Brian.


On 11 April 2013 14:22, Javier Serrano <javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> As you know, the BE-CO-HT section at CERN has been contributing to Kicad
> for some time now. We see this involvement as a key part of our activities
> regarding Open Source Hardware [1]. We are also contributing to the
> adoption of VHDL and SystemVerilog in the Icarus Verilog simulator, so as
> to enable cross-language simulation. Other related activities include the
> operation on the Open Hardware Repository [2] and the development of the
> CERN Open Hardware Licence [3].
>
> Regarding our contribution to Kicad, it took us some time to put our act
> together, but I believe we are now ready to announce that development has
> started in earnest. We have come up with a preliminary roadmap [4], which
> has been discussed with the main Kicad developers [5]. We have agreed that
> this strategy is at least a good enough base to start development work.
>
> The main actors involved on our side will be:
>
> - Maciej Sumiński, aka "Orson". He is going to be with us for a year
> within CERN's Technical Student Programme, working full time on Kicad. He
> started in March. He has already started working on a new View component
> for Kicad as you saw yesterday.
> - Tomasz Włostowski, aka "Tom" or "Tomek", Orson's supervisor. Tom works
> on hardware design most of the time, but is also developing a Push & Shove
> router for Kicad.
>
> We are very excited about the opportunity to contribute to Kicad, and I
> would like to thank all Kicad developers (in particular the main
> developers: Jean-Pierre, Dick and Wayne) for bringing Kicad up to a level
> of quality and features where we would judge it worthwhile to invest in. We
> very much look forward to collaborating with you all.
>
> In addition to the manpower I described, we have a small budget we
> sometimes use to get work done through companies. If browsing Kicad code
> you see files with a CERN copyright statement and an author either from
> among the main Kicad developers or another company (only Igalia [6] so
> far), that's the way that code was contributed. We believe one way of
> making Kicad sustainable and reliable for professional use is to have
> companies sell support contracts for Kicad, and companies which contribute
> code to Kicad will of course be ideally placed to sell such contracts. This
> should sound familiar to people who know how many of the major Linux
> distributions work from a financial point of view. There are probably other
> ways to reach these goals, and I am very interested in this topic, so
> please don't hesitate to contribute ideas in this domain.
>
> Our budget for Kicad development is as I said very modest. If you think
> what we are doing is useful and you would like to help us work better and
> faster, please consider donating. CERN's Knowledge Transfer Group has set
> up a donations page [7], as part of a global fund-raising effort for
> projects which present an interest to society, even if they are not in the
> core mandate of CERN (Particle Physics research). There is also a link to
> the donations page from the CERN Kicad wiki [4]. I would also like to ask
> you to forward this link to whoever you think might be interested. The
> donations page is in a very primitive state right now. It does not allow
> payment through Paypal, credit cards or other methods yet. You are
> requested to send a message to cern.and.society@xxxxxxx and then you get
> bank account details which allow you to make a money transfer. This is a
> bit inconvenient but I can tell you any contribution at this point in time
> will be very useful to go faster through the roadmap.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help. We are really looking forward to working
> with all of you. Cheers,
>
> Javier
>
> [1] https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=190126
> [2] http://www.ohwr.org/
> [3] http://www.ohwr.org/cernohl
> [4] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki
> [5] Referred to as "Main Authors" in file AUTHORS.txt of the Kicad sources.
> [6] http://www.igalia.com/
> [7] http://cernandsociety.web.cern.ch/technology/kicad-development
>
>
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