kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 11:01 PM, Marco Ciampa <ciampix@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On the geda-user mailing list started a _very_ interesting discussion
> about the future of open source EDA tools and openhardware trends.
>
> See: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/44049
>
> The event that kindled the discussion is the eruption of new web
> tools like these:
>
> http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/scheme-it
> https://upverter.com/
>
> There is a big mediatic pressure to use this kind of web/cloud tools
>
>
> http://electronicdesign.com/products/still-drawing-circuits-napkin-try-scheme-it-instead
>
> And someone see these as what really are: a new and powerfull kind of
> lock-in.
> The real problem? As always: the document format.
>
> Adapt or die. How to remedy?
>
>  - unite the scarce resurces: you may say I am a bit naive but I always
>  wondered the reason of the existence of two so similar (at aim) projects
>  like geda and kicad. What about to keep in touch more and try to, if not
>  coalesce, integrate better what can be easiling united like component
> libs?
>
>  - try to create a common format to use or try to consider the other
>  free formats more in a way to make easier to import/export from/to these
>  sibling projects with the goal to be able, one day, to use a unique common
>  source
>
> What do you think?
>
> --
>
>
> Marco Ciampa
>
>

Hi Marco,

 Of course it's more lock-in - you get that even from DesignSpark which
you can install  and run locally. I don't know what we can do about that
other than to do our best to communicate that with KiCad you have the
best long-term document security: the formats are documented, they are
in ASCII, etc - you control everything. The web-based ones may be OK
for a few trivial projects if you only want to make a single board for some
hobby work, but you control nothing and this is not good for people who
might be thinking of mass manufacturing and selling their product.

 As for working with gEda, there are several different projects in that
group so that makes it more difficult to coordinate and they all have
a different approach. In many ways KiCad is superior to gEda so I don't
see how we gain anything with forcing some collaboration. Developing
common formats for communicating information such as the footprint
is the job of industry committees and we can see that there has been
no agreement on how to do that. There are already projects which attempt
to describe things like footprints using a scheme which can then be
translated to many proprietary formats; if anything I think we might
benefit from more collaboration with those projects than with gEda,
but in this instance that's something for the people working on the
library, not for the developers.

 One of the things which seems to attract people using the web tools
is the 3D visualization; maybe we should sell KiCad's VRML and
IDF capability more?

- Cirilo