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Introducing CERN BE-CO-HT

To : Kicad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

: Kicad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> From : Javier Serrano <javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx>

: Javier Serrano <javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:22:02 +0200

Dear all, As you know, the BE-CO-HT section at CERN has been contributing to Kicad for some time now. We see this involvement as a key part of our activities regarding Open Source Hardware [1]. We are also contributing to the adoption of VHDL and SystemVerilog in the Icarus Verilog simulator, so as to enable cross-language simulation. Other related activities include the operation on the Open Hardware Repository [2] and the development of the CERN Open Hardware Licence [3]. Regarding our contribution to Kicad, it took us some time to put our act together, but I believe we are now ready to announce that development has started in earnest. We have come up with a preliminary roadmap [4], which has been discussed with the main Kicad developers [5]. We have agreed that this strategy is at least a good enough base to start development work. The main actors involved on our side will be: - Maciej Sumiński, aka "Orson". He is going to be with us for a year within CERN's Technical Student Programme, working full time on Kicad. He started in March. He has already started working on a new View component for Kicad as you saw yesterday. - Tomasz Włostowski, aka "Tom" or "Tomek", Orson's supervisor. Tom works on hardware design most of the time, but is also developing a Push & Shove router for Kicad. We are very excited about the opportunity to contribute to Kicad, and I would like to thank all Kicad developers (in particular the main developers: Jean-Pierre, Dick and Wayne) for bringing Kicad up to a level of quality and features where we would judge it worthwhile to invest in. We very much look forward to collaborating with you all. In addition to the manpower I described, we have a small budget we sometimes use to get work done through companies. If browsing Kicad code you see files with a CERN copyright statement and an author either from among the main Kicad developers or another company (only Igalia [6] so far), that's the way that code was contributed. We believe one way of making Kicad sustainable and reliable for professional use is to have companies sell support contracts for Kicad, and companies which contribute code to Kicad will of course be ideally placed to sell such contracts. This should sound familiar to people who know how many of the major Linux distributions work from a financial point of view. There are probably other ways to reach these goals, and I am very interested in this topic, so please don't hesitate to contribute ideas in this domain. Our budget for Kicad development is as I said very modest. If you think what we are doing is useful and you would like to help us work better and faster, please consider donating. CERN's Knowledge Transfer Group has set up a donations page [7], as part of a global fund-raising effort for projects which present an interest to society, even if they are not in the core mandate of CERN (Particle Physics research). There is also a link to the donations page from the CERN Kicad wiki [4]. I would also like to ask you to forward this link to whoever you think might be interested. The donations page is in a very primitive state right now. It does not allow payment through Paypal, credit cards or other methods yet. You are requested to send a message to cern.and.society@xxxxxxx and then you get bank account details which allow you to make a money transfer. This is a bit inconvenient but I can tell you any contribution at this point in time will be very useful to go faster through the roadmap. Thanks in advance for your help. We are really looking forward to working with all of you. Cheers, Javier [1] https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=190126 [2] http://www.ohwr.org/ [3] http://www.ohwr.org/cernohl [4] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki [5] Referred to as "Main Authors" in file AUTHORS.txt of the Kicad sources. [6] http://www.igalia.com/ [7] http://cernandsociety.web.cern.ch/technology/kicad-development

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