I don't work in that field, so I can't answer your question directly, but I can pass on that EAGLE, which is probably KiCad's closest competitor, is available for free for academic institutions:
They also suggested EasyEDA:
...which is a free online PCB layout program. I played with it for about five minutes but not much more than that. It's got an autorouter but I haven't found an autoplacer tool (although EAGLE didn't have one either).
Anyone know this? Is it any good?
In my opinion, KiCad is already better than EAGLE even not taking the price into account.
We MUST be able to license the project for commercial parties to produce them, lest we have to support the project for its entire life-cycle, which can be decades. Also, a non-commercial license restrict sharing between labs, or even use for some entities that work as government contractors.
That makes no sense. Software licencing and product support are two completely different factors. You can have software support agreements with open-source software, that's how companies like Red Hat and Canonical make their money.
Hardware is not software - you don't simply compile it in your computer. You don't pay other company to just do just give support to you: you license to them so they can tweak it, manufacture, and sell the hardware to you and other research labs.
That is one of the more bizarre things I've read here. You are saying an licence whose terms explicit permit copying for free are worse at sharing than licences that forbid it doing sharing it, ever.
> You don't pay other company to just do just give support to you: you license to them so they can tweak it, manufacture, and sell the hardware to you and other research labs.
That's just weird. The people who maintain my car didn't make it, the people who supply me my email didn't design it, the people who run my government don't own it. All the software I run has security patches supplied within hours, for free, by people who didn't write it and don't own it. And yes, they are faster and break less than their commercial "upgrade to the new version" counterparts.
You and your labs live in an alternate universe to me, my friend.
Open-source support companies can still tweak the software for you, and are free to do so because of the permissive licences.
Take a look at the business model section of Red Hat's Wikipedia page:
Going OT but staying on this theme: It seems likely that public money across many governments is spent on closed source software for circuit design. Even probably across the projects in a single developed country I imagine it might be an economy to pay for the software to be modified. Such changes then being a gift to society at large.
What do electronic engineering students use at present - presumably a range of CAD systems, but is KiCad up there?
Academics (in the UK) is there any effort towards making free-libre software available through collaboration of different institutes?