Capitalists can also start software businesses and sell their software, but those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
Well, gee, let's look at the sponsorship page for KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/
I see a couple EU companies, but no EU governments. It takes a paltry $15K to be a Platinum sponsor.
I picked KiCad because PCB design is critical military infrastructure, the alternative programs are almost all under non-EU jurisdictions and could be pulled, and KiCad is both open source and local desktop to top it all off. This is exactly the kind of quiet, unflashy toil that desperately needs support from a government entity.
Lots of areas need support for open source alternatives that are controlled by proprietary software that might vaporize. I picked PCB design because it's an easy target. Cadence and Synopsys have locks on VLSI design domains that could get yanked from the EU. VHDL tooling is still disastrously poor. Everybody could use an alternative 3D modeling kernel (the EU is a little better here because the dominant proprietary kernels are from Dassault Systèmes and Siemens). I'm sticking to software as the domain because the purpose of the funding is obvious (pay developers, duh), but it also applies to things like small manufacturing and maintaining domestic supply chains (but the purpose and focus becomes a lot messier).
And yet, everywhere I look, any project I pick, crickets.
I don't expect the EU to front run, but something like KiCad is 3 bloody decades old.
> those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.
And yet you had the rise of Akihabara as an electronic parts mecca which then later got eclipsed by Shenzhen. And that's not even talking about the fact that the modern computing sits atop a mountain of stuff developed out of the VLSI Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project).
All of those occurred because their respective governments threw money around.
Sure, maybe you won't create another Silicon Valley hare, but, perhaps, just perhaps, you might create a relentless, open source EU tortoise that slowly displaces the proprietary software. The EU is good at slow--relentless, not so much.
Sadly, a continual state of inertia and sclerosis and failure around tech seems to be historically European: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-eurochip/
There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs. And I repeat myself: NLNET can only rule on the proposals it receives. Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
I don't agree. Even if proprietary software is somehow "better" (and I don't concede that automatically), proprietary software is always at the risk of disappearing--see: VMWare after the Broadcom purchase. Your critical software being open source means that you have the right to fork/copy and just keep going without needing to do anything else. Proprietary software disappearing means that you need to file legal paperwork and get a judge to care and then wrench the source code out of someone's hands.
The failure modes are vastly different.
And this is before we get into the whole undocumented, proprietary storage formats issue.
> Have you proposed to spend a year improving the KiCad UX?
I am in the US. Can a US citizen propose that? I would assume that this has to come from EU citizens, no?
To be honest, if I could get KiCad some funding simply by filing some paperwork, that's probably a good investment of time.
> There are already alternatives to KiCad for PCBs.
Not really. Autodesk bought Eagle. Renesas bought Altium. Cadence bought Orcad. There's a whole host of stuff controlled by China. Most of the other free things aren't even close to KiCad.
I guess maybe PADS, since it's owned by Siemens? But I haven't bumped into a PADS user in a very long time--I wonder if it's considered legacy or just far too expensive.