I have thought about this at one point and have many friends in the EDA industry. I can say with conviction that you are absolutely right. If you want to imagin

I have thought about this at one point and have many friends in the EDA industry. I can say with conviction that you are absolutely right. If you want to imagine a parallel to software, just imagine what would have happened to open source movement if gcc did not existed. that is the first choke point in eda and then there are proprietary libraries for everything. add to this an intentionally inoptimal software designed to maximize the revenue and you get a taste of where we are at this point. IMO the best thing that can happen is some company or a consortium of fabless silicon companies buy up a underdog EDA company and just opensource everything including code/patents/bugreports. I'd bet within a few years we would have more progress than we had in last 30 years.