[xondono]

You’re seeing too much conspiracies.

CAD is hard, and it’s very hard to displace the incumbents, for the same reason that is hard to change programming languages, people have too much tied up in the old option.

Most of the free/open source alternatives were built by part providers (Mouser, Farnell,..). The objective was clear, if your CAD has direct links to your site, this will probably make you the default provider. It was a good plan, until they realized how hard CAD really is. After burning tones of cash, they sold them for pennies on the dollar to the only people that wanted them, companies like Autodesk that think they can make them financially viable.

I’ve been waiting for this release for quite some time, KiCAD is powerful enough, but I found KiCAD 5 very non-ergonomic, and supposedly KiCAD 6 has a better UI.

[aidenn0]

Autodesk has a long history of buying up competitors that make cheaper products, going back to the MS-DOS days.

[romwell]

>You’re seeing too much conspiracies

Nah fam, I'm seeing my favorite tools like Netfabb disappear and become subscription-only parts of the Autodesk ecosystem.

CAD is not just EDA, or the niche that KiCAD occupies.

[hulitu]

CAD is also Magic which is alive and well.

[zibzab]

I think kicad 5 was meant to fix the library mess while kicad 6 is supposed to focus on UX.

It was sold to me as "what blender did last time", which is music to my ears.

[mhb]

> it’s very hard to displace the incumbents

I don't know how this fits into the narrative, but Protel, which started as an affordable, very good option continued to improve and is now Altium.

[xondono]

Altium/Protel is very much an incumbent with >30 years in the market

[mhb]

That's the point. It demonstrates that, despite it being very hard to displace the incumbents, it has been done.