The nice thing about Altium is that they also cater to low profile customers, like me. I have been using it for 27 years, and if Autodesk buys it, it may turn to shit; probably some cloud BS, which is the way things are going.
I’ve recently started to use Autodesk’s Fusion 360. It’s an abomination!
It’s so user hostile and constantly getting in the way of getting work done. Years ago (2001 ish) when I first started to learn CAD I used PTC’s Pro/Desktop. It’s a simple package and not without its faults but when you consider the pace of technological development since then it’s appalling how much CAD has stepped backwards. Everything is clunky, cloud strangled, ribbon interface befuddled and runs like molasses.
It's not just that FreeCAD is "a bit hard to use" it's that it has maybe 3% of the features available in the AutoCAD suite of tools. Plus there is the massive collection of third party industry specific tools the build on top of AutoCAD.
I disagree about the 3% of features. With plugins and the massive amount of extensibility possible in FreeCAD, I think it actually has most of the functionality of AutoCAD, let's say 80%, and a good number of features that AutoCAD is missing. However, discoverability of these features is abysmal (which is why most people think that they don't exist), and it can be VERY hard to use, depending on what you're trying to do.
I definitely couldn't replace Solidworks or Fusion360 with FreeCAD in terms of speed of use, especially if I was sitting down with all 3 for the first time.
OK 3% is was probably harsh, but if you look across the whole AutoCAD suite at things like their MEP tools, AutoCAD Civil, AutoCAD Map 3D and so on you'll find whole domains of features that FreeCAD doesn't even begin to address.
This is true. However, there are very few roles which use ALL of these tools. They are almost completely different applications that just share a base rendering window; they lie in completely separate domains. With that in mind, yes, FreeCAD doesn't have those features, but they exist in other open source applications.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
My point was to highlight really how big and sprawling the AutoCAD ecosystem really is and how meaningless a statement like FreeCAD can compete with AutoCAD is without specifying both context and domain.
With that in mind, yes, FreeCAD doesn't have those features, but they exist in other open source applications.
I really wish that was true. It would make my life much better.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
I'm intentionally not. Because if I where I would also be talking about Navis, Infraworks, Revit, 3DS and so on.
And just to be clear I greatly dislike AutoCAD and if I never had to use it again it would no doubt improve my quality of life.
Because none of the developers had ever been users, had any experience drafting.
AutoCAD was basically a UI for a pen plotter.
One notable exception was Duff Kurland. He liked hanging out with us users and would chat us up. He'd get our bugs fixed. We loved him.
Generic CADD was pretty good, much loved. So Autodesk had to kill it, natch.
Only Bentley's MicroStation was more user hostile.
Later, an intern at Bentley created an amazing auto snapping & aligning input tool. Especially for isometric drawings. I don't know came of it.
User interface researchers like Suresh Bhanavi did some really good work. He was hired by Army Corp of Engineers to determine why CAD work had poor quality and ROI (often negative), compared to just using drafting boards. He tried to advocate his findings. The CAD vendors weren't interested.
I doubt Autodesk or Bentley ever addressed their distain for users.
Gods, writing this now, I'm angrily remembering helping coworkers fix their SolidWorks and 3DS Max problems.
A few startups were more user and domain focused. ArchiCADD and Rhino come to mind.
Source: Was a CAD jockey in the 80s/90s. My "chaotic mutant user interface" critique (allegedly) got wide circulation within Autodesk. Briefly served on Bentley's steering committee; waste of time.
PS: Just looked at Autodesk's current product list. Wow. They're the Computer Associates / SoftBank of design software.
I actually love Fusion 360. My prior experience was autocad about 20 years ago when I was in high school, and more recently, Sketchup. The cloud stuff though is crazy annoying. But I also don't pay anything for the tool, so :\
That said, there is a makers version of SolidWorks coming to the market this year.
I have the free personal hobbyist license and also love it. Learning how to use it to make my own custom models was one of my most gratifying pandemic personal growth projects. Very empowering.
The advancement of CAD software over the last 20 years has been one step forward, one step back. There are lots of small, genuinely helpful everyday improvements (try doing modeled threads in Solidworks 2001 vs 2021), but they've also packaged in a lot of obnoxious "functionality" that is constantly nosing it's way into your workflow. The 3D modeling suites are IMO overall more usable, but the 2D stuff was arguably more usable before the ribbon craze.
Autodesk's present scheme seems to be to make as much of their software cloud-connected, with the purpose of entrapping all your company's vital IP within.
Definitely quite usable for modeling parts and basic assemblies. I use it almost exclusively now when working on community hobby projects, so as to make sure everyone has access to the development tools to make their own modifications.
But it's definitely behind the curve in terms of how friendly and discoverable the user interface is. It's a powerful modeler, but I'm not sure that it's in a good state to be used by a large engineering team on multiple large projects. In particular, a lot of the PDM options for FreeCAD seem sort of questionable; for better or worse, a lot of organizations are going to need it to interface with their current data management software. I haven't seen the effort to do that yet.
I wouldn't call it an abomination. Bloated, yes, full of little quirks, true, but I can sit down, design a CAD model with multiple components, simulate it's motion and stress points, fix any interferences, lay out the parts in a technical drawing, 3d print half of it, and CNC mill the rest, all in the space of 2 hours. In fact I just did that this morning, from 5 AM starting a design, to 7 AM, now, when I just finished pulling parts out of the mill.
It's ridiculously powerful, and the cost is about 1 cup of coffee per day. I'm running it on an $800 laptop that's a year old, and it's snappy. My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?
Yeah, I agree. Sometimes weird, but the fact remains that with a bit of thought I can design a piece of furniture, and then with parametric measurement make small tweaks at the end so I can easily work off the materials that I have. E.g I can design a part to be .75” thick, but if the finished planed mahogany I have is .747c I just update the piece and my joints still work!
The CAM works, the simulations work, the assemblies work. It’s Cheap for what it is. I don’t even touch the sculpt, electronics, or sheet metal workspaces and those are included!
My personal bugbear is that the rotary 4th axis cam is so expensive.
>My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?
Linux is not the most widely used desktop OS - that is windows by a long shot and that is the segment that matters here. Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
UNIX once dominated CAD/CAM/CAE and was never a strong name on the desktop. Robustness, security and stability are valuable features for such market. Ignoring linux today for technical tools shows a lack of vision or unportable low quality legacy code.
"desktop OS" is not what I said, it's what you inferred. Linux is the base for every Android device, and most servers run some flavor of it, most routers run it, most widely used system for embedded OS, the list goes on. I meant precisely what I said.
> Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
Why indeed? I disagree with "negligible" here, but for any sort of advanced and automated workflow, Linux is the best choice.
Fusion 360, IMHO, is a slick and capable CAD tool. It absolutely does require a muscular machine but once you get used it and the space mouse, it's very intuitive and pleasing.
There's a learning curve, of course, for any CAD system. It takes WEEKS of regular usage to get reasonably fluent and even then you'll get snagged with a "how do I?" problem regularly. The hardest part is unlearning bad habits. There's easy ways and hard ways to do things. Sometimes the hard way is initially more intuitive, but ends up costing effort and time.
It's helpful, I think, to watch pros use it and see what they do. That's another good feature. It has a decent user community and there's lots of help available.
I think a lot of people used to find Pro/E to be extremely user hostile and difficult to work with. One you got used to it you could be efficient, but it is not known to be user friendly software. Plus they have gone the ribbon route just like all the other CAD software.
I've tried Fusion 360, and I agree, it is just such a pain compared to SolidWorks which I use for work. I already have a paradigm for design in my head due to how long I've used CAD and Fusion 360 doesn't match that. I'm somewhat surprised that Solid Edge isn't more popular in the maker space, it is similarly free for hobbyists and is legitimately CAD software that professionals use.
> It’s a simple package and not without its faults but when you consider the pace of technological development since then it’s appalling how much CAD has stepped backwards.
CAD is bad because there are too few users.
Work backward from the Altium statements. Altium has about $200 million in revenue. Altium website claims licenses are about $2K-ish. That's a maximum of about 100K paying users (reality is likely closer to 25K).
If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
CAD is bad because it is made by SW developers who implement requirements and have no idea how the SW is used. I do not need all the toolbars at once. If the buttons are too small they are difficult to press, if they are too big they eat valuable space.
> If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
:) Most of the features are used sporadically.
> In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
No. There is a workflow. During this workflow you may, or may not need special features depending of the object being designed.
> Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
There are some very good open source tools (like Magic layout system) but they are good because the developers also use those tools.
> The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
AFAIK there are no "CAD coders". There are SW developers who got the job to write the code. Finding people qualified in multiple domains is hard.
> There are some very good open source tools (like Magic layout system) but they are good because the developers also use those tools.
Sorry, the Magic layout system is NOT a good tool.
It has a lousy DRC/extraction system based on corner stitching which requires that everything be lambda-based rectangles. Ever seen a professional VLSI layout person use rectangles?--they almost never do. There's a good reason why they use paths.
Good layout systems also link the schematic and layout in real-time. A lot of PCB systems even do this now.
I can go on and on and on about Magic. None of it is good.
I switched from Altium (CircuitStudio) to Fusion 360 and never looked back. Actually Altium has a very intuitive UI/UX, but the bugs were starting to annoy me. First it was custom component revisions becoming uneditable ( https://circuitmaker.com/forum/#posts/246594 ) which has been an ongoing issue for over 2 years. Then the auto-routing feature (a sad necessity for retrocomputing enthusiasts who need to route dozens of signals at once) started generating really obvious short-circuits. Rarely if ever do Altium staff descend on the forum and chime in.
The increasing consolidation in the professional software market is concerning to say the least. I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others. Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly on design and publishing tooling. Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite". Same with Autodesk and how they turned e.g Maya from one of the greatest software packages of all time into a bug-ridden shadow of its former self.
Tools like Blender and KiCad really get my hopes high that we have a century of industry standard open source software with good UX ahead of us. I would be much more to e.g pay 50 bucks a month to blender foundation than being a hostage of Creative Cloud.
I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did.
"Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite".
There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.
Last year I used Darktable and Lightroom side by side. They were both steaming piles of crap. Lots of bugs, crashes, and extremely high CPU usages. Darktable was slightly less buggy on MacOS but not much. Lightroom was easier to figure out but I’m not really using anything but basic features on both apps.
Similarly I used Darktable under OS X and didn't hit to any bugs. Exporting files require some patience since it maxes all cores at once, but nothing crashed or burned during the journey.
I do not remember Darktable ever crashing on me (well I am not professional and maybe not using all the features heavily). Also I use it less than a year, maybe older versions were less stable. I use it on Windows which can be a factor as well.
I've tried to use Darktable as replacement, and there's no comparison in terms of UX and functionality (within the specific use case that Lightroom is intended for).
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
I personally use Darktable to process my raw photos for some time. While I didn't use Lightroom for any considerable amount of time, I've found that Darktable can process relatively modern raw files (A7III in my case) easily and with pretty high quality.
What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.
For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
Main thing I find Lightroom is superior compared to Darktable is being able apply adjustments consistently across groups of photos. You might have say 6 photos all taken of the same subject in the same conditions. You adjust one the way you want, and then literally copy and paste the categories of settings from one to all the other photos you want. Darktable doesn't seem to have that sort of workflow to get through hundreds of photos quickly.
This is perfectly doable in Darktable too. You can either save the adjustments you want as a style or just copy the history stack and paste to other images.
I have a Canon point and shoot that I use for underwater photos and Darktable really doesn't cope well with some of the RAW files. I believe it's related to the zoom. I also vastly prefer Lightroom's overall workflow. That may be something that could be fixed with adjustment, though.
The problem is UX, so it's not missing something in the sense that it's not possible to achieve something, rather, that something is very easy to achieve for somebody who's not an expert.
The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:
- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
- pano stitching
- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)
- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.
I understand for what you saying, but when I started to use Darktable (>=2.4.x and 3.x to be exact), giving an hour of poking allowed me to understand most of its basic operation. So latest iterations of Darktable is not obscure like earlier versions of Blender. It's much more discoverable.
> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.
> pano stitching
Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.
> auto retouching;
Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.
> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.
I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.
I use Darktable. It is not as ergonomic as Lightroom but since it has enough actual functionality I gladly take it over having to deal with all that subscription insanity in general and dealing with Adobe in particular.
I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.
The Affinity software[1] has been excellent for my usecases. Their pricing is also incredible, with Photo and Designer each running $25 right now. Last week one of our employees said during a call that Photo their best software purchase in recent years.
That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground.
I second affinity. As someone who often resorted to pirated Photoshop because of it's very infrequent use, the first time I saw that affinity got all of the PS and Illustrator features I use for $50 combined I jumped on it. I couldn't be happier with my decision.
Pixelmator is like $30 (once, not subscription) and is better than Photoshop.
IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it.
DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux.
Is there a decent size community for Pixelmator? The difficulty with many of the open source or lesser known commercial products is that even if they're better than the big market leader, the amount of learning materials and community support is so much greater for the market leader.
TBH The Affinity Triad (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is more popular than Pixelmator, more featured, does windows & mac and has a community. It's also a pay-once set of apps and is made by a medium size software company in the UK called Serif. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
I have no idea how anti-trust laws in the united states are supposed to work. Like why is Disney allowed to buy every studio? Why is Amazon allowed to buy like anything? Facebook also being allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp is crazy.
This is because it's just a sale of intellectual property (or physical property) from one company to the other - the U.S. prides itself on the individual liberty to do so, and because corporations are legal persons they're also allowed to do that. That's why, if the government or someone else thinks a certain sale is anticompetitive, you have to make a case that they shouldn't be allowed to exercise that liberty.
Buying the rights to old movies is quite a bit different than buying patents or businesses.
In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different.
Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?
As long as you can't show direct consumer harm, and esp if the products are free, Anti-Trust law in the US isn't about reducing choice (EU) but in raising prices. So if you can't show a price hike, the mergers and monopolies are allowed.
I am firm believer in the EU model of anti-trust and this wouldn't have even be possible if they both agreed.
Monopolies are actually not illegal, only anti-competitive behaviour is. Beyond that, it's a matter of political doctrine. People in power are now extremely lenient when it comes to what constitute abusing a monopoly...
This is why I’m optimistic about ai based software engineering tools.
Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.
>Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly
I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk..
Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again.
If Apple cared about products they would strive for more competition to push them to create better products and not to cement their monopoly. During Jobs's leadership, yea, they innovated with amazing products but they also stepped up patent trolling, anti-competitive practices and hostile takeovers.
Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15
The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths.
This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.
Not the OP, but this is already happening for the browser. See e.g. https://mightyapp.com/ that was posted to HN not too long ago.
It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer.
Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/
I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.
> I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others.
I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation:
Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Golive (vs Dreamweaver), Photoshop (vs Fireworks) and even had its own Flash knock-off (LiveMotion). So way too much redundancy so that most Macromedia product rapidly went unmaintained, or abandoned when Adobe failed to milk them. But where Adobe completely dropped the ball, and where Macromedia strength was is community. Macromedia's product community was incredible. I also can't believe they had that many developers knowing Action Script to throw it all away, there are millions thing Flash could have done, like focus on game dev or desktop dev. It's just that Adobe wasn't willing to invest much in it at some point.
Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping...
Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.
> I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did.
Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe.
They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month.
We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD.
We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).
The consolidation is an illusion caused by not seeking out and/or encountering new competitors. Once there was Adobe plus some small-time company you were fond of. Then Adobe bought that small company. So now you think that only Adobe remains. Guess what? Some other company has taken up the slack, filling the niche left behind by that other small-time company. You just have to go find it.
Wow - surprised they rejected takeover. Most of these go through after some negotiation on price - very interesting to see a firm look to preserve itself - guess I'm curious what boards plans are.
“The Altium board appreciates the interest expressed by Autodesk ... however, it considers that the proposal significantly undervalues Altium’s prospects and therefore rejects the proposal at the current price,” the company said in a statement to the ASX.
Unfortunately, this should probably be viewed as a negotiation on price. They certainly don't have the door closed.
That's certainly fair, I think the big exception would be if the board feels they are at a local minimum, and that the potential acquirer is being overly opportunistic. Partly that's trivial, because that's when companies frequently make these types of bids.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if a company wants to advocate the case for proceeding as an independent entity, they will make it abundantly clear. This is not that.
> I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if a company wants to advocate the case for proceeding as an independent entity, they will make it abundantly clear. This is not that.
certainly. i'd interpret it as though they consider the offer low, but within the ballpark, and aren't offended.
For market segments where FLOSS can't penetrate, consolidation and oligopolies seem unavoidable. The costumers behave mostly favoring a winner-takes-all approach that eventually kills any competition.
It took years until arduino-like tools got good enough to eat the mcu proprietary tools lunch. We're still a few years away until symbiflow does the same for fpga. But for markets where FLOSS can't penetrate, I don't see much hope.
1/ You don't see this as giving up your diamond but making it shine bigger and faster. You believe that your $3.9B valuation can grow faster with the help of a larger partner perhaps this is best for you and your investors.
2/ You have been running a company for some time and you are tired of running it or want to get out and "cash out" your hard work.
3/ You don't believe you can maintain a $3.9B valuation under future market conditions or upcoming competition and so you are willing to take the premium now (better for you and investors)
> Maybe I'm missing business 101, why would you want to give up some your large diamond to some other company?
Because you want $3.9B of cash instead of a company worth $3.9B.
Also funny since I would much rather have $3.9B in cash than a large diamond “worth” $3.9B, since diamond prices have been falling for many, many years, compared to alternative stores of wealth. And also, I would get zero utility from a diamond in the first place.
I'm okay with companies charging money for tools that are genuinely clever and innovative, but when the world eventually builds enough critical work on top of those tools, we inevitably end up in a hostage situation like this one.
The negative externality of the public losing access to the tools needed to build and modify essentially all of technology eventually exceeds even the tyrannical rents that a monopolist or hedge fund can extract when the public suddenly has no other option.
Maybe proprietary software should be required to go open source after 20 or 30 years.
Copyright protection lasts 70 years so in 70 years we'll have VMs running today's software for free. It's going to be exciting times for my great-grandchildren. Imagine how much better the 22nd century will be from that network effect.
It won't, because the limiting factor of what makes a century good is unlikely to be based on the quality of its professional tooling. Tooling is pretty universally in a 'good enough' state.
Also, you could pirate and run 90s software today if you wanted to. Almost nobody does (And it's not because nobody pirates software...)
I think there is a tipping point where something becomes so ubiquitous that it needs to become something like a common carrier or an open standard. The government could mandate something like any file format that has 20% or more has to be an open standard.
I am amazed that well capitalized companies over $x million are even allowed to merge/be acquired at all (by default). In my mind, after a certain point, it clearly becomes a case of anti-competitive behavior and should not be allowed unless they can prove otherwise.
A year ago Altium positioned itself as the hobbyist friendly EAGLE alternative by advertising that they still sell affordable permanent licenses when Autodesk forced subscriptions down everyones throat.
Recently, they burned those bridges by insisting on subscriptions, making the cheapest license $10k all while still keeping the old advertisements listing a $2.9k price online. And for hobbyists, $10k is too steep.
I tried to reason with them, but to no avail. I know of several other people who had a similar experience.
Recently, the KiCAD nightly built has gained an almost flawless Altium importer, better OpenGL rendering with supersampling, and there's a patch in the pipeline that'll let KiCAD open, modify and display Altium documents almost pixel-perfect. And thanks to automated tools, the free offline-capable KiCAD library is now exceeding the scope of the paid online-only Altium vault.
I'd give them until the KiCAD 7.0 stable release expected to arrive in 1-2 years.
> And thanks to automated tools, the free offline-capable KiCAD library is now exceeding the scope of the paid online-only Altium vault.
Well, you say this but as a KiCad dev I will say our library team is heavily understaffed and entirely burnt out. Very few library submissions have been processed in over a year. The automation is there to validate agaisnt rules but there's some that still need to be checked manually, i.e. actually confirming everything matches datasheets, etc.
It's a thankless job.
That's unfortunate to hear. I agree that it's a thankless job, which is probably why companies usually pay for a service to do it instead.
SnapEda charges $60 for schematic, footprint, and a simplistic 3d model. KiCAD could offer the same service but with the added benefit that components are added to the library afterwards.
Here's the thing. We aren't an organization and most of us would probably be prohibited from joining such under the usual employment contracts. Nobody is making money from it as is.
The librarians themselves are entirely self organized and basically work independently of the code base developers. They are generally not programmers at all (and don't need to be).
While there are some efforts underway to start slushing around the donation balance we have gained, it takes time when everyone is largely a volunteer with limited time.
I run a hardware company and mandate all boards are done in KiCad. That means I have invested a lot of money in to KiCad and given monetary incentive for EEs to learn it/use it. We love it. Automation, git integration, small size on disk, runs on all platforms, it's great! Thanks for your hard work.
Recently due to chipageddon and imminent production of our major equipment we have been reaching for some less common (but available) components. Therefore we've started drawing up symbols/footprints/3D models more regularly. Even basic stuff is sometimes not there. I naturally want to contribute back but noticed:
(1) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-footprints is now read-only on Github but had 336 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 412 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(2) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-symbols is now read-only on Github but had 217 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where is has 304 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(3) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-packages3D is now read-only on Github but had 75 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 93 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
Things I take from this: (1) Fundamentally the transition to Gitlab (which I support!) could have been handled better by KiCad, and this is harming community engagement - eg. you should either keep them up to date as mirrors of Gitlab or shut down the old Github repos and redirect users to Gitlab. (2) Gitlab requires SSH keys to allow cloning, which breaks for most scripts/automation (by design). This should have been considered deeply before the move with a strategy to mitigate the user impact. (3) The current de-facto UX of having to mystically discover a move happened, manually creating a Gitlab account, upload an SSH key and manually re-clone three repos in-place while preserving KiCad path configuration is a poor user experience to say the least, which less technical users will not be able to do, and should preferably have been handled automagically by KiCad itself using rsync or something.
Asking devs to validate submissions is insane. Instead, consider to invest some time to create an off-git unified submissions process which enables users to verify one another's uploads, sort of like a captcha, ie. "does this pin on this footprint match this datasheet?" or "do the overall dimensions of this package match this datasheet?". This would allow for submissions but require some community engagement on upload to lessen the load for existing maintainers. To make up for potential inaccuracy, just fire the same content at a few people to verify, or even hand out open source experience library helperships to students: KiCad summer of datasheets.
2. Yea the gitlab library transition was not clean...technically it was never finished. Once we get to RC1 for V6. I myself hope to switch over fixing up all our web content instead of chasing down Windows platform bugs.
2. The codebase devs actually have no involvement with the libraries. The libraries are already community ran. The problem is most people would rather file issues asking for new parts rather than finding a way to help.
3. Most everyone is a volunteer largely except for the two that make money doing paid support which is a job in of itself. We can't organize interns because none of us have the interest in burning more free time than we already do.
4. The current mindset of the librarians has been _quality_. Because bad PCBs due to component issues can be expensive and time consuming problems. And issues with components will not only harm trust of the libraries but also KiCad
5. Could we develop some sort of less-gitlab-dependent web system? Sure. Do we have the engineers with free time to do it? Absolutely not in a million years. I dream of doing it, I certainly have the ability to but I need to have a life too ;)
The bigger issue is the industry, hardwarists can have little or no programming background or don't feel comfortable outside whatever low level programming they do. So I don't fault them but that's the hand being dealt. This is a niche industry tool with niche demographic.
Not a fan of getting involved on github. There are reasons we use gitlab and it's mainly to avoid the daily github drama and noise.
The biggest obstacle here is to get everyone else to buy in, mainly the librarians....who I'm honestly not sure how to hunt down for a conversation. Core devs probably don't want to deal with anything major/new until v7 next year at this point.
If KiCAD gains some signal integrity stuff (and other niceties you get with the expensive stuff) then it'll be really good for the space, I think.
KiCAD is far from perfect, however some industry familiars should be apologetic and embarrassed at how poor their offerings are compared to the open source equivalent (plural even, sometimes). I didn't spend a huge amount of time in Altium designer but, although I did like parts of the UI, it just seemed like a old codebase past it's sell by date with a pretty face slapped on top.
KiCad 7 will get power and signal integrity tools. In fact, there is already a branch with working DC power integrity simulation prototype (current-density/voltage-drop/resistivity) where you only have to specify a board and all ports with their constraints.
I haven't used Altium but I have use Kicad and the experience was pretty bad. It's very unusuable software. I don't think Altium has anything to worry about at all from Kicad.
However, I did recently discover Horizon EDA, which uses the Kicad core, but is way way way way saner and easier to use. Give it a decade and it might be worthy competition. Though surely Altium is only really targeted at FTSE500 companies who need really advanced features and can easily afford $10k licenses. I don't see them using open source alternatives.
Anyway, I just want to big up Horizon a bit more because it's so so so much better than Kicad:
I wouldn't say Solidworks is mid range. I have used Solidworks and NX extensively and they're very very similar. I haven't used Altium but the companies I've heard using it aren't "mid range" companies and everyone describes Altium and Mentor as basically the two "pro" options.
EAGLE/Altium is kind of the cheapest level for connecting a CPU to RAM with length matching. So as soon as you're an ambitious hobbyist, you'll need something comparable.
For example, Chinese hardware startups selling through aliexpress tend to use Altium. But I don't think they'll buy many licenses. And I can't afford to. I really have no idea who would buy it, except for people who have old Altium files that they absolutely need to open.
>I haven't used Altium but I have use Kicad and the experience was pretty bad. It's very unusuable software. I don't think Altium has anything to worry about at all from Kicad.
We've greatly revamped the experience in KiCad v6 available as the current nightlies. Meanwhile I agree 5.1 and older are awful.
Hmm maybe I will try it again, but last time I even went as far as asking about the terrible UX on the mailing list and was met with lots of "it's fine; we're not dumbing the interface down for noobs" (though two people privately emailed me to say they strongly agreed). So I'm not holding my breath!
4B is more than 20x revenue (182m). If I understand the financial report correct, profit is only 12% of that. Genuinely asking, how does this bid make sense? Where do you make your money back? 10+ year timeframes?
I always found it so fascinating how a new startup/unicorn that has 0 revenue can be valued at 10B when a company like Altium that has a good amount of footing in the PCB/EDA world is only valued at 3.9B
The startup sells a dream of immense future profit.
Altium has spreadsheets full of sales, income, and expenditure which pretty much indicate what the future profit will be.
Altium's revenue is roughly $200 million USD. MBA standard valuation on that is 10-year revenue--$2 gigabucks. $4 gigabucks is a significant premium for a company that basically has no growth.
My guess is that Adobe didn't want to pay enough cash and was going to be using too much stock in the deal.
Altium would be a bunch of fools for not cashing out right now, though. KiCAD is right about at the level where it is going to start eating the bottom tier of customers. Even 1000 users lost would be a big hit to their revenue.
We'll probably buy one last set of Altium licenses to support current designs, but KiCAD 6 will probably become our default PCB software in the next year.
139 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadIt's also worth noting that Altium didn't say no. They said the offer wasn't high enough.
Capita, in the UK, has had a reputation for only growing through acquisition and not organically according to some commentators.
It’s so user hostile and constantly getting in the way of getting work done. Years ago (2001 ish) when I first started to learn CAD I used PTC’s Pro/Desktop. It’s a simple package and not without its faults but when you consider the pace of technological development since then it’s appalling how much CAD has stepped backwards. Everything is clunky, cloud strangled, ribbon interface befuddled and runs like molasses.
I definitely couldn't replace Solidworks or Fusion360 with FreeCAD in terms of speed of use, especially if I was sitting down with all 3 for the first time.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
With that in mind, yes, FreeCAD doesn't have those features, but they exist in other open source applications.
I really wish that was true. It would make my life much better.
I think what you are really comparing at this point is FreeCAD, the application, to Autodesk, the brand.
I'm intentionally not. Because if I where I would also be talking about Navis, Infraworks, Revit, 3DS and so on.
And just to be clear I greatly dislike AutoCAD and if I never had to use it again it would no doubt improve my quality of life.
The problem is that everybody uses a different 80%.
"a good number of features that AutoCAD is missing"
Everyone needs a different bunch of features, and for some of them that would exclude AutoCAD.
AutoCAD was basically a UI for a pen plotter.
One notable exception was Duff Kurland. He liked hanging out with us users and would chat us up. He'd get our bugs fixed. We loved him.
Generic CADD was pretty good, much loved. So Autodesk had to kill it, natch.
Only Bentley's MicroStation was more user hostile.
Later, an intern at Bentley created an amazing auto snapping & aligning input tool. Especially for isometric drawings. I don't know came of it.
User interface researchers like Suresh Bhanavi did some really good work. He was hired by Army Corp of Engineers to determine why CAD work had poor quality and ROI (often negative), compared to just using drafting boards. He tried to advocate his findings. The CAD vendors weren't interested.
I doubt Autodesk or Bentley ever addressed their distain for users.
Gods, writing this now, I'm angrily remembering helping coworkers fix their SolidWorks and 3DS Max problems.
A few startups were more user and domain focused. ArchiCADD and Rhino come to mind.
Source: Was a CAD jockey in the 80s/90s. My "chaotic mutant user interface" critique (allegedly) got wide circulation within Autodesk. Briefly served on Bentley's steering committee; waste of time.
PS: Just looked at Autodesk's current product list. Wow. They're the Computer Associates / SoftBank of design software.
That said, there is a makers version of SolidWorks coming to the market this year.
Autodesk's present scheme seems to be to make as much of their software cloud-connected, with the purpose of entrapping all your company's vital IP within.
But it will eventually be good enough. For some things it already is.
KiCAD gave me hope. It is possible to have professional grade open source CAD software.
But it's definitely behind the curve in terms of how friendly and discoverable the user interface is. It's a powerful modeler, but I'm not sure that it's in a good state to be used by a large engineering team on multiple large projects. In particular, a lot of the PDM options for FreeCAD seem sort of questionable; for better or worse, a lot of organizations are going to need it to interface with their current data management software. I haven't seen the effort to do that yet.
It's ridiculously powerful, and the cost is about 1 cup of coffee per day. I'm running it on an $800 laptop that's a year old, and it's snappy. My biggest complaint is lack of Linux support, which is abominable since Linux is the most widely used OS on the planet, but what can you do?
The CAM works, the simulations work, the assemblies work. It’s Cheap for what it is. I don’t even touch the sculpt, electronics, or sheet metal workspaces and those are included!
My personal bugbear is that the rotary 4th axis cam is so expensive.
Linux is not the most widely used desktop OS - that is windows by a long shot and that is the segment that matters here. Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
> Why would a software maker invest the time and effort in catering to a negligible slice of the desktop OS market?
Why indeed? I disagree with "negligible" here, but for any sort of advanced and automated workflow, Linux is the best choice.
There's a learning curve, of course, for any CAD system. It takes WEEKS of regular usage to get reasonably fluent and even then you'll get snagged with a "how do I?" problem regularly. The hardest part is unlearning bad habits. There's easy ways and hard ways to do things. Sometimes the hard way is initially more intuitive, but ends up costing effort and time.
It's helpful, I think, to watch pros use it and see what they do. That's another good feature. It has a decent user community and there's lots of help available.
I've tried Fusion 360, and I agree, it is just such a pain compared to SolidWorks which I use for work. I already have a paradigm for design in my head due to how long I've used CAD and Fusion 360 doesn't match that. I'm somewhat surprised that Solid Edge isn't more popular in the maker space, it is similarly free for hobbyists and is legitimately CAD software that professionals use.
CAD is bad because there are too few users.
Work backward from the Altium statements. Altium has about $200 million in revenue. Altium website claims licenses are about $2K-ish. That's a maximum of about 100K paying users (reality is likely closer to 25K).
If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
CAD is bad because it is made by SW developers who implement requirements and have no idea how the SW is used. I do not need all the toolbars at once. If the buttons are too small they are difficult to press, if they are too big they eat valuable space.
> If you have 1,000 features, you have 100 users per feature.
:) Most of the features are used sporadically.
> In reality, those features follow a power law. Everybody uses the same basic features, but if you use a slightly off-path feature, you may be the only user.
No. There is a workflow. During this workflow you may, or may not need special features depending of the object being designed.
> Open source is the only path forward in this space because code can accumulate over time and users can consolidate over time.
There are some very good open source tools (like Magic layout system) but they are good because the developers also use those tools.
> The problem is that CAD coders are even rarer than CAD users, and they can get get paid quite a lot in their day job--why should they do this for free?
AFAIK there are no "CAD coders". There are SW developers who got the job to write the code. Finding people qualified in multiple domains is hard.
Sorry, the Magic layout system is NOT a good tool.
It has a lousy DRC/extraction system based on corner stitching which requires that everything be lambda-based rectangles. Ever seen a professional VLSI layout person use rectangles?--they almost never do. There's a good reason why they use paths.
Good layout systems also link the schematic and layout in real-time. A lot of PCB systems even do this now.
I can go on and on and on about Magic. None of it is good.
It's an incredibly intuitive and well designed 3D CAD design tool for beginner to intermediate complexity 3D printer projects.
For more complex design I'll use blender or onshape. I've tried Fusion and just find it too convoluted!
There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.
It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/
I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.
For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
Just did the same thing last week.
As I've said, I didn't use LR for any significant amount of time. Its workflow may be smoother, but I don't prefer Adobe's software, though.
The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:
- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
- pano stitching
- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)
- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.
> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR
Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.
> pano stitching
Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.
> auto retouching;
Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.
> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.
It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.
I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.
I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.
That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground.
1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.
IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it.
DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux.
Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.
As long as Disney doesn't 'harm' consumers they are allowed to consolidate. Harm is poorly defined in this case.
In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different.
Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?
I am firm believer in the EU model of anti-trust and this wouldn't have even be possible if they both agreed.
Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.
I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk..
Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again.
https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888
That is a consequence of having a monopoly.
Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15
If they are in a monopolistic position, why would they bother with the expense?
The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths.
This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.
It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer.
Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/
I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.
I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys (Assuming you meant FreeHand instead of Pagemaker)
At least Fireworks was an actual Macromedia creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping...
Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.
Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe.
They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month.
We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD.
We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).
Unfortunately, this should probably be viewed as a negotiation on price. They certainly don't have the door closed.
very few sane organizations would ever completely refuse. everything is a negotiation.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if a company wants to advocate the case for proceeding as an independent entity, they will make it abundantly clear. This is not that.
certainly. i'd interpret it as though they consider the offer low, but within the ballpark, and aren't offended.
Autodesk probably dodged a bullet here.
It took years until arduino-like tools got good enough to eat the mcu proprietary tools lunch. We're still a few years away until symbiflow does the same for fpga. But for markets where FLOSS can't penetrate, I don't see much hope.
Maybe I'm missing business 101, why would you want to give up some your large diamond to some other company?
1/ You don't see this as giving up your diamond but making it shine bigger and faster. You believe that your $3.9B valuation can grow faster with the help of a larger partner perhaps this is best for you and your investors.
2/ You have been running a company for some time and you are tired of running it or want to get out and "cash out" your hard work.
3/ You don't believe you can maintain a $3.9B valuation under future market conditions or upcoming competition and so you are willing to take the premium now (better for you and investors)
Just to name a few
Because you want $3.9B of cash instead of a company worth $3.9B.
Also funny since I would much rather have $3.9B in cash than a large diamond “worth” $3.9B, since diamond prices have been falling for many, many years, compared to alternative stores of wealth. And also, I would get zero utility from a diamond in the first place.
The negative externality of the public losing access to the tools needed to build and modify essentially all of technology eventually exceeds even the tyrannical rents that a monopolist or hedge fund can extract when the public suddenly has no other option.
Maybe proprietary software should be required to go open source after 20 or 30 years.
That might be a bit extreme but something like enforced export tooling and/or open standard interop might be feasible.
Also, you could pirate and run 90s software today if you wanted to. Almost nobody does (And it's not because nobody pirates software...)
A year ago Altium positioned itself as the hobbyist friendly EAGLE alternative by advertising that they still sell affordable permanent licenses when Autodesk forced subscriptions down everyones throat.
Recently, they burned those bridges by insisting on subscriptions, making the cheapest license $10k all while still keeping the old advertisements listing a $2.9k price online. And for hobbyists, $10k is too steep.
I tried to reason with them, but to no avail. I know of several other people who had a similar experience.
Recently, the KiCAD nightly built has gained an almost flawless Altium importer, better OpenGL rendering with supersampling, and there's a patch in the pipeline that'll let KiCAD open, modify and display Altium documents almost pixel-perfect. And thanks to automated tools, the free offline-capable KiCAD library is now exceeding the scope of the paid online-only Altium vault.
I'd give them until the KiCAD 7.0 stable release expected to arrive in 1-2 years.
Well, you say this but as a KiCad dev I will say our library team is heavily understaffed and entirely burnt out. Very few library submissions have been processed in over a year. The automation is there to validate agaisnt rules but there's some that still need to be checked manually, i.e. actually confirming everything matches datasheets, etc. It's a thankless job.
SnapEda charges $60 for schematic, footprint, and a simplistic 3d model. KiCAD could offer the same service but with the added benefit that components are added to the library afterwards.
The librarians themselves are entirely self organized and basically work independently of the code base developers. They are generally not programmers at all (and don't need to be).
While there are some efforts underway to start slushing around the donation balance we have gained, it takes time when everyone is largely a volunteer with limited time.
Recently due to chipageddon and imminent production of our major equipment we have been reaching for some less common (but available) components. Therefore we've started drawing up symbols/footprints/3D models more regularly. Even basic stuff is sometimes not there. I naturally want to contribute back but noticed:
(1) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-footprints is now read-only on Github but had 336 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 412 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(2) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-symbols is now read-only on Github but had 217 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where is has 304 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
(3) https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-packages3D is now read-only on Github but had 75 unanswered pull requests. Then moved to Gitlab, where it has 93 merge requests. Meanwhile, existing user pulls from Github aren't getting new data.
Things I take from this: (1) Fundamentally the transition to Gitlab (which I support!) could have been handled better by KiCad, and this is harming community engagement - eg. you should either keep them up to date as mirrors of Gitlab or shut down the old Github repos and redirect users to Gitlab. (2) Gitlab requires SSH keys to allow cloning, which breaks for most scripts/automation (by design). This should have been considered deeply before the move with a strategy to mitigate the user impact. (3) The current de-facto UX of having to mystically discover a move happened, manually creating a Gitlab account, upload an SSH key and manually re-clone three repos in-place while preserving KiCad path configuration is a poor user experience to say the least, which less technical users will not be able to do, and should preferably have been handled automagically by KiCad itself using rsync or something.
Asking devs to validate submissions is insane. Instead, consider to invest some time to create an off-git unified submissions process which enables users to verify one another's uploads, sort of like a captcha, ie. "does this pin on this footprint match this datasheet?" or "do the overall dimensions of this package match this datasheet?". This would allow for submissions but require some community engagement on upload to lessen the load for existing maintainers. To make up for potential inaccuracy, just fire the same content at a few people to verify, or even hand out open source experience library helperships to students: KiCad summer of datasheets.
My 2c. Keep up the great work!
1. The pulls got copied over to gitlab.
2. Yea the gitlab library transition was not clean...technically it was never finished. Once we get to RC1 for V6. I myself hope to switch over fixing up all our web content instead of chasing down Windows platform bugs.
2. The codebase devs actually have no involvement with the libraries. The libraries are already community ran. The problem is most people would rather file issues asking for new parts rather than finding a way to help.
3. Most everyone is a volunteer largely except for the two that make money doing paid support which is a job in of itself. We can't organize interns because none of us have the interest in burning more free time than we already do.
4. The current mindset of the librarians has been _quality_. Because bad PCBs due to component issues can be expensive and time consuming problems. And issues with components will not only harm trust of the libraries but also KiCad
5. Could we develop some sort of less-gitlab-dependent web system? Sure. Do we have the engineers with free time to do it? Absolutely not in a million years. I dream of doing it, I certainly have the ability to but I need to have a life too ;)
The bigger issue is the industry, hardwarists can have little or no programming background or don't feel comfortable outside whatever low level programming they do. So I don't fault them but that's the hand being dealt. This is a niche industry tool with niche demographic.
The biggest obstacle here is to get everyone else to buy in, mainly the librarians....who I'm honestly not sure how to hunt down for a conversation. Core devs probably don't want to deal with anything major/new until v7 next year at this point.
KiCAD is far from perfect, however some industry familiars should be apologetic and embarrassed at how poor their offerings are compared to the open source equivalent (plural even, sometimes). I didn't spend a huge amount of time in Altium designer but, although I did like parts of the UI, it just seemed like a old codebase past it's sell by date with a pretty face slapped on top.
However, I did recently discover Horizon EDA, which uses the Kicad core, but is way way way way saner and easier to use. Give it a decade and it might be worthy competition. Though surely Altium is only really targeted at FTSE500 companies who need really advanced features and can easily afford $10k licenses. I don't see them using open source alternatives.
Anyway, I just want to big up Horizon a bit more because it's so so so much better than Kicad:
https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon
There's another tier of PCB design tools above Altium with matching cost per seat, e.g. Mentor Graphics Expedition. Unigraphics, for mech Es.
Both of the above owned by Siemens! They certainly know how to charge large sums of money!
For example, Chinese hardware startups selling through aliexpress tend to use Altium. But I don't think they'll buy many licenses. And I can't afford to. I really have no idea who would buy it, except for people who have old Altium files that they absolutely need to open.
We've greatly revamped the experience in KiCad v6 available as the current nightlies. Meanwhile I agree 5.1 and older are awful.
Well done if that attitude has changed though!
My guess is that Adobe didn't want to pay enough cash and was going to be using too much stock in the deal.
Altium would be a bunch of fools for not cashing out right now, though. KiCAD is right about at the level where it is going to start eating the bottom tier of customers. Even 1000 users lost would be a big hit to their revenue.
We'll probably buy one last set of Altium licenses to support current designs, but KiCAD 6 will probably become our default PCB software in the next year.