For example, Altium Designer is probably the most modern (not most powerful although close) PCB suite and yet despite costing thousands a seat it is a slow, clunky, single-threaded (in 2020) program (somehow uses 20% of a 7700k at 4.6GHz with an empty design). Discord also thinks that Altium Designer is some kind of Anime MMO
https://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2020/04/Development-Highlight-Alt...
git clone https://git.dev.opencascade.org/repos/occt.git
[1] https://dev.opencascade.org/index.php?q=node/1212#comment-86...
Like you say, it's kind of shocking to see one core running at 100 percent while the rest do nothing and the app is sluggish in 2020.
In the same vein something like ECAD tools don't use GPU-accelerated 2D rendering but instead use GDI and friends (which used to be HW-accelerated, but isn't since WDDM/Vista).
A lot of "easy" opportunities to improve UX and productivity.
Hardly Altium Designer's fault, but I too would avoid using it.
Even though it has a long history of open-source attempts, as pointed out by Tim in his presentation, they are few and far between, and massively underwhelming compared to the thriving open source software community.
However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.
The opensource EDA toolchain community is already producing some good stuff, Symbiflow: https://symbiflow.github.io/ is a good example, it's an open source FPGA flow targeting multiple devices. It uses Yosys (http://www.clifford.at/yosys/) as a synthesis tool which is also used by the OpenROAD flow: https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD-flow which aims to give push-button RTL to GDS (i.e. take you from Verilog, which is one of the main languages used in hardware to the thing you give to the foundry as a design for them to produce).
The Skywater PDK is a great development, which is a key part of a healthy opensource EDA ecosystem though there's plenty of other great developments happening in parallel with it you will note there's some people who are involved in several of these projects they're not all being developed in isolation. The next set of talks on the Skywater PDK include how OpenROAD can be used to target Skywater: https://fossi-foundation.org/dial-up/
If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?
I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby is quite small.
Reduce the entry cost to affordable levels, and you have increased the number of people dramatically. Which is btw also why I believe that "you can buy 32 core threadripper cpus today" isn't a good argument to ignore large compilation overhead in a code base. If possible, enable people to contribute from potatoes. Relatedly, if possible, don't require gigabit internet connections either, so downloading megabytes of precompiled artifacts that change daily isn't great either.