zlacker

There is an EU initiative to bring in chip manufacturing but it's not related to open source. For sovereignty purposes, airgapped software or locally made software is as good as open source and it's usually higher quality.

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?

>>direwo+(OP)
> For sovereignty purposes, airgapped software or locally made software is as good as open source and it's usually higher quality.

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.