kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Miguel Ángel Ajo <majopela@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday, 20 de March de 2015 at 16:49, Javier Serrano wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx (mailto:oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx)> wrote:
> > 2015-03-20 15:19 GMT+01:00 Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx (mailto:mrluzeiro@xxxxx)>:
> > > This type of support and community is what they expect when pay for a commercial product... if something is wrong.. they will ask the company for support..
> > > But, this is an issue in the opensource software feeling in general. But I believe some projects are making a good work in give people trust on this matters.
> > >  
> >  
> >  
> > I feel it quite the opposite. For a commercial product it is hard to
> > get sane support, while open source projects are very easy.
> >  
>  
>  
> I see this as a two-dimensional issue. The opposite of free/open is
> proprietary. The opposite of commercial is non-commercial. There are
> four possible combinations. I think free/open and commercial is a
> winning combination. The software stays free-as-in-freedom, and
> free-as-in-free-beer for those who want it that way. If, in addition,
> we could find a way to reward those who make KiCad such a great tool,
> that can only be good. Look at successful free software projects. Most
> of them have a way to reward key contributors. Some people get paid
> full-time salaries to contribute to the Linux kernel, the Apache web
> server and many other projects. I hope KiCad gets there one day. Sorry
> for the digression, but I see this commercial-vs-open issue pop up
> often and I thought I'd give my view on it.
>  

I expect that to happen in the next years, to my eyes, KiCad to hardware
is a bit what GCC was to software decades ago.

Open Hardware is slowly becoming more relevant (open compute project, the CERN
projects, etc…), and I expect that to grow, specially after all the latest KiCad contributions,
from features, to building, to everything…

Open and free is sustainable. Open always wins in the long term. We need to figure out
how to fit open for hardware, HP recently jumped on the OCP project, they’re building servers
and racks based on the OCP designs, It would be awesome if such designs started to happen
with KiCad.

About the confluence thing, It just works, and core project participants are software/hardware
developers, nobody of us wish to spend his time in maintaining or developing a web, the problem
with lots of common open source software/CMS for the web is maintainability, security, fixes.

Something based in RST & compilation to HTML + a cute design would be awesome, because
it would foster developer participation in the website maintenance.

If someone is volunteering to do such thing, go ahead, prove it’s better than the current solution,
I can provide a build server & hosting, repoint the DNSs, whatever is needed, but It’s not something
I would do myself, as I prefer to invest my little little time in KiCad+python development, that it’s the
important thing for us.


Cheers!, and freedom ;)