They say 500K USD investment would make it surpass Altium Designer. How much 20 seats of AD licenses cost to a company? What would bebthe TCO if KiCad would provide these features? Training, documentation, support.
Who says that? Not a chance.
500k would just about pay for a team to write proper documentation. A good developer costs about 200-250k per year (after benefits, office space, CPUs, proper software tools, etc). A great one is give or take double that. This isn't the kind of software that can be written as a 1 man show. So you also need a good PM. Don't forget QA. (Although Altium seems to have.) And to actually git er dun, you need to have a single location where the team sees each other every day, not a loose band of remote code monkeys.
I'd say $10MM +/- $2MM, and 2 years.
Then, if you actually want something companies will use, it needs to have some kind of long term support. Just being open source isn't enough, there has to be A TEAM to answer questions and be able to actually prioritize bugs that aren't interesting to developers that work only for fun. Add another $10MM.
And since it will miss budget on cost and time, let's call it $30MM and 3 years.
Now let's say that at the Altium level you can sell a seat for $4000. (Ultra cheap, for what it is.) You need to sell 15,000 seats just to start. I think there are easily that many seats out there, and easy pickings.
So once you have all that, why in the hell would you work on open source kicad? You'd do better to protect your IP and churn out yet another proprietary EDA software.
What's wrong about remote code monkeys? Can't they be as efficient as local ones? What about the Linux project? They are a giant Open Source project with people collaborating worldwide and they are providing good results with a giant codebase.
I agree about Project Managers, I think a good project needs at least one or two of very experienced full time ones, probably maybe over per subsystem for big projects. I believe Open Source projects requires a lot more skilled and talented than most proprietary software.
I don't see the point of having a place with people working on them:
- No secrets: This doesn't need a super secret project place and security to avoid means, it's open after all.
- Less resources/money needed:
* You save lots of money by people working at home or even collaborating institutions in the case of CERN. You save the costs of buying or renting a place.
* You can save money by working on institutions with their workstations, but can also provide good and diverse hardware to the developers specially if requiring testing and compatibility.
- Compiling and automated testing: It could be done with one of these cloud services to have big iron for it.
- Documentation: It could be done by the programmers themselves if providing a good management and managers having a strong discipline about that. It could annoy developers until they get used to this different workflow and management, but newcomers would welcome to have a good documented codebase.
User documentation and didactical resources:
- I agree it needs a dedicated team and/or skilled collaborators that provide them updated and supervise translation. There can be volunteers too.
Protecting "Intellectual Property":
- There's crazy reverse engineers everywhere, you can make the effort more difficult but your product is going to be reverse engineered is there's enough interest. I also don't trust on proprietary software that requires Internet for license activation, like with Altium Designer.
- Most professionals and even researchers in the industry design their PCBs based on commercially available electronic components.
- I think the artificial " Intellectual Property " concept only benefits the big corps to make oligopolies. Ideas aren't a property but knowledge, they must be shared for the sake of progress. Anyway, I don't see a benefit tandake your own EDA unless you are Intel.
- By combining efforts and saving unneeded costs, you can make a more customizable tool that is even cheaper to maintain and use.