Evolution of CERN’s support to KiCad
Javier Serrano
Dear all,
With this message I would like to inform you of an important milestone at CERN regarding our support to KiCad development. Below you will find a more lengthy version with some historical context and rationale, but the short of it is that we are going to stop our donations programme and we have started paying for a support contract with KiCad Services Corporation (KSC). We think the donations programme is now a bit redundant with the other two options to donate. For reference, people can give through an account made available by KSC and through the Linux Foundation. In both cases, the use of money from donations is decided exclusively by the KiCad project. We now believe that KiCad is at a level of features and quality which makes it suitable for many of the PCB designs at CERN. The natural way for us to keep supporting it is, as for other EDA/CAD tools, to pay a commercial company to support CERN users through a dedicated group in CERN’s IT Department. As of today, we will close our donations site and we will use the remaining money to subcontract development tasks to KiCad lead developers, as we have done so far.
This is an appropriate moment to thank all the KiCad community for their impressive work and for providing such a pleasurable environment for discussing and contributing to the enhancement of this great tool. Special thanks also to all our donors, who have enabled us to contribute many important features through the years, and to the CERN & Society Foundation for their continuous support in this endeavour.
Cheers,
Javier
Longer version
The start of our contributions to KiCad was linked with our Open Hardware strategy in the BE-CO-HT section at CERN. Discussions started in 2008. We had identified the lack of high-quality FOSS PCB design tools as one of the obstacles to effectively share our designs. It took some time for discussions to crystallise in the decision to join KiCad development. That happened in 2011. The two main actors at CERN at that time, and for many years after that, were Tomasz Włostowski and Maciej “Orson” Sumiński. Together, they brought a great number of features to KiCad, and also spent a lot of effort in the thankless task of organising, refactoring and generally helping clean up the huge code base so as to provide a solid foundation for future evolution. In 2013, we started a donations programme through the CERN & Society Foundation. In-kind contributions (i.e. code by Tom and Orson) started ramping down while we used donations to pay lead developers outside CERN to work on new features. That scheme has been very successful and thanks to the efforts of our friends at C&S has remained in force until now. We organised the first EDA devroom at FOSDEM in 2015, and that devroom quickly became a meeting place for the KiCad development community. I had the pleasure to coordinate it also, with slightly varying themes, in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, and Seth Hillbrand took over for 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Since 2011, we have directly or indirectly contributed many features to KiCad, including a unified geometry library, the push & shove router, a new graphics engine with GPU acceleration, a new framework for editing tools, new footprint and symbol editors, the library browser, a redesigned DRC engine, the inspector tool, support for differential pair and bus routing, and many others. Our commercial support contract now includes the possibility of paying for new features, and we have started using that possibility, so our contributions to KiCad’s code base will continue in that form. There are currently two KiCad lead developers affiliated with CERN: Roberto and Tom. Their lead development activities happen outside CERN time, but their help as KiCad experts (along with Orson’s) will be invaluable as CERN IT and the CERN drawing office provide the tool, and PCB design services based on it, on a more widespread and official basis.
Helping take KiCad to the point where this transition could be envisaged has been quite a ride. We have had the chance to interact with extremely talented and welcoming individuals. As I look back, I want to explicitly acknowledge the initial contribution of Jean-Pierre Charras, who started KiCad development on his own to provide his students in Grenoble with a tool they could take home. The last time I spoke with JP, he told me KiCad is now in good hands, and I can only agree. Thank you JP, Wayne, Seth and the rest of the lead dev team, also past members, librarians, translators and the whole KiCad community. We are fortunate to be part of this collective endeavour and look forward to more exciting developments in KiCad.
Wayne Stambaugh
Hi Javier,
As the KiCad project leader and as a developer who was with the
project when CERN initially made it's decision to support KiCad, I
would like to extend my sincerest thanks to all of the help that
CERN has provided. From handling donations to paying for
developer time, CERN has given KiCad the support to get project to
the place it is today. It has been a privilege working with
everyone at CERN and I am looking forward to years of cooperation
to come.
Many Thanks,
Wayne
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