I disagree. I think there are several things which make Eagle more popular:
1) It was there first. Eagle may not be Free (libre), but it has a free (gratis) version, and has had one for quite some time, and has been mature for a very long time too. In addition, it has a Linux version, so it wasn't shunned by the Linux crowd like some other free (gratis) programs out there. Anything that's first usually has a bad advantage in inertia and mindshare. 2) Most users don't care about Freedom, so as long as something's free (gratis), that's good enough for them. And with Eagle, it apparently doesn't matter that to do anything really useful, you have to shell out big bucks, because the free version is so limited in its capabilities. If you really want to get Kicad to take on Eagle, what you need to do is supplant it, and you don't do that by simply making something technically superior; you have to completely replace it for its users. This means you need to make Kicad Eagle-compatible: it needs to be able to both read and write Eagle .sch and .brd files. That way, Kicad users can read all the Eagle projects floating around out there, and they can save their projects in Eagle format too for all the Eagle users. Eventually, Kicad will grow in mindshare as people realize they're not locked into it and can still be compatible with Eagle. OpenOffice.org hasn't been dominating the Office software world by pushing its own formats to the exclusion of everything else. It's compatible (both read and write) with MS-Office formats, so people can easily use it as a complete replacement for MS-Office. What's the result? The #1 office suite of course is MS-Office (there's that inertia thing again), but #2 is easily OpenOffice.org, and not some proprietary suite like Lotus. Dan --- In [email protected], "dandumit" <dandu...@...> wrote: > > Comparing with Eagle I consider Kicad far better. > > But what makes Eagle to be so spread on net ? One answer is that you can find > very easy eagle projects free. > > That's why I think that each one of this community should make (at least) one > of his project(s) free on net. > > Please tell me what do you think. And when we'll have few projects available > we can start to build a library and to promote more this suite. > > I would go further and I would make a donation system and with money gathered > I would pay ads on Elektor , Google ads and so on. > > To give an example I will publish a stupid simple (but usefull) > schematic+board.
