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I think the tipping point for KiCad was when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses, and decided to pour those resources into im

I think the tipping point for KiCad was when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses, and decided to pour those resources into improving KiCad instead. That's how I understood it, anyway. I suppose some large-ish entity that relies on CAD will need to take the same view. I have less faith in academia there, however -- I suspect many of those sitewide licenses are heavily discounted in order to cultivate the addiction, to profit from it later. That's just speculation, though. This is where we really need good software bounties. I'm sure a whole lot of scorned F360 users would throw a few bucks a month into a Patreon or something to advance the state of FreeCAD. I'm not even directly impacted by this; I have a F360 license through my employer, but I'm offended enough on principle to contribute if there's a place to do so.

redis_mlc 6y ago
> when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades. (It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.) Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use case. Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.