Fritzing - the past, the present and the future
Franken, Patrick
Making electronics accessible to the broad public was mainly made possible by Arduino, the Raspberry PI and last but not least Fritzing. Back in 2009 it was a pain to get from a loose wiring on a breadboard to a PCB. Fritzing came up first with a unique breadboard view and a simple to use PCB layout. Fast forward 10 years Fritzing is still widely used by over 200.000 users but struggles to find a sustainable way to fund its development. This talk will give a rough introduction to Fritzing including its strength and weaknesses and introduce a roadmap for its further development. TBD
 Are we ready? We are ready? Really busy here. So for my talk, first the shortest claimer, this is not a technical topic. Okay, no one's leaving. Compared to the other topics we had before. Really. But before I start off with the talk, I would like to say thank you for Javier for another round this year of organizing the staff room. And to all the other people like the guy at the camera. Thank you. Okay, today I would like to talk to you about Fritzing. Is anyone here who has not heard about Fritzing before? Oh great, I thought okay, I asked this question this round because it's probably this way. Okay. I talk about Fritzing not because I maintain Fritzing. Actually I have not a lot to do with Fritzing. But once my company has to do with Fritzing is that we provide the Fritzing FAP. And this is really important because I can only give advices. I do not own the brand. I do not own the code. I own nothing. What I just do is to provide the Fritzing FAP. So please keep this in mind. I can only give advices through this talk. Everything else is up to the Fritzing, this to be discussed later, who is actually on Fritzing. But first I would like to give a short introduction on Fritzing and what it actually is. Because you may ask yourself, okay, it is something to draw PCBs, to do technical sketches on electronics. But how is it like compared to, let's say, a key cat? There is a huge difference. This is from the Fritzing Wikipedia page. And what you notice is that Fritzing is not intended to be used by electrical engineers. That is a major difference. It is used for designers, artists, who just want to have a few LEDs blink on their shirt, something like this. These are people who start off with an Arduino, then hook up some LEDs to the Arduino and continue to grow. But because of this, I believe that an application like Fritzing is great for key cat 2, because Fritzing, later in the process, maybe two years later, will head over to QI-CAT. But this is a process. They start off with Fritzing, do their sketches, do their totally weird PCBs with some strange routing. It doesn't matter. It's totally fine. Because of this, Fritzing has this unique breadboard view. So most of you just say, okay, what crap is this? I can do my routing with this. I just do it. I can just do a schematic. But for, let's say, artists, this is a great way to have something really already working on your table and then bring this what you have on your table over to a schematic. And this is a visual way to do such. And from this breadboard view, you can go over to doing a PCB layout to what's said here, a more permanent circuit. So compared to key cat, Fritzing is more like, oh, I already have something which is actually working on my desk. Now I want to professionalize it. That's a little bit different compared to other traditional EDA tools. So Fritzing is widely used. How did that happen? One of the reasons is that whenever you open a book from, let's say, O'Reilly and look for all the sketches within this book when it's about electronics, of course, they are mostly made by Fritzing. Because people like this visual breadboard view to just see, okay, they can imagine that is something I can build on my own. That's why it's so popular in books, lectures, education, also with pupils. So for really basic electronics. But with everyone who does basic electronics, maybe later get someone who does professional electronics. And so the result is that right now, Fritzing is used by 200,000 people. So it is not like the last 10 years. This is right now. So there was some tracking within Fritzing. So we know that this is true. But so far, so good. Now it gets a little bit more interesting. Because Fritzing has a lot of open source applications. He has a problem. It's not able to find developers, maintainers and such. How do I know? This probably is the indicators you see in a lot of open source projects. Open issues, open pull requests. The project is released three years ago. Okay, two years, I'd say two years. The project has died. Actually not because a lot of people use it. But there's no development ongoing. So there is just evidence that there is any development. So I asked myself, how could that happen? And the first thing was, maybe is there any money missing to pay a maintainer to really care about this project? So let's see how the Fritzing open source project earns any money to sustain or sustain a new development and to fund the development. How does that work? On the one side, we have prototype manufacturers. These are PCBs and EMS services which do PCBs, assembly and such, such as we do. And we give 10% of every Fritzing sketch which gets paid through us back to Fritzing. And this is enough to pay like half a developer. And the other thing is partner IC manufacturers. So whenever you would like to have a part from your company within Fritzing, within the library, there are part manufacturers which pay Fritzing to have their parts in the library. This for example happens with or happens with SparkFun. SparkFun has all these tiny breakout boards and SparkFun pays Fritzing for this. I have no clue about the amount, but there is obviously something going on. So money is not an issue here. What is it then? Oh, this is just another slide how this integration into the FAP looks like. So the user always has the independence to decide where to manufacture the PCB on the upper. And we have just a Garber export, but if you hit the fabricate button, you're directly redirected to the Fritzing FAP. What I, during the investigation, noticed is that there is a flaw in the legal structure of Fritzing. And what is for me really important is that something like this does not happen to let's say Kikat. So what happened here? On the left we have the Fritzing UG which is a German limited liability company. And on the right is the Friends of Fritzing which is a public association. All the money goes into the limited liability company. But there is, or I don't know about any connection between these both parties. And all the developers and everything is going on here, but here is no money, no funding at all. And on this side, I have no clue about this. Maybe Striperson Hooker's, no idea. And this is something which somehow has to be changed. I have no clue on how to change this, but this is a situation right now which is like a dead end for an open source application. Because the right for the Fritzing brand is here, but all the money is over here. So we ask ourselves what to do next. And I'm really passionate about this. First, because my company provides a Fritzing Fab, but more because I believe an application like Fritzing is really necessary for an ongoing stream of new electrical engineers to get young people interested in this thinking around. Because this is what Fritzing really is good for. So one idea which came to my mind is maybe we could do a fork, but I am really afraid of forks. So this is something like what happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And when I ask my mom, please download some open source software, OpenOffice software, she will probably look for OpenOffice because she knows OpenOffice. So it's in the people's mind. They don't think about LibreOffice. Everyone here around thinks about LibreOffice because we had FOSSTEM, obviously. But all the other people in the world think, OK, it's OpenOffice. And they don't care that it is owned by Oracle. So this is the same with Fritzing. If we would start a fork of Fritzing, everyone would just continue to use the former Fritzing. And we would have to come up with a new name, and I think the name is really great. So I do not want to come up with a new name. So this, personally, for me, is not an option here. Another idea would be that, I believe, maybe it's just necessary to have a maintainer for Fritzing, which I can't be because that would take the independence out of Fritzing. I do not want to do that. But what I or respect if Isla would do is to just pay half time of a maintainer because I believe with a maintainer there are developers out there which work for Fritzing, but they are disappointed by how the project is leached right now. So I believe with a maintainer which is really passionate about Fritzing and with some support from our side, they could get some traction into this project because then all the developers, and there are a few out there, would start working on Fritzing again. That is what I believe. But totally forget that. This guy also would have to talk to the original Fritzing team, which is, that's what I can tell, kind of hard. But at least maybe give it a try. So this is open for discussion. Later after 4STEM, I will open up an issue on the Fritzing-Zittab repository with a link to the recording of this talk to give everyone a short idea on what the current situation is because I do not want to decide it on my own. We as a company do not want to decide this on us. So it is a question to the community also to find someone who feels responsible for this. And I believe for such a great project there are people who would love to maintain this project. Thank you. Thank you. So we have time for questions. Have you considered the fact that it's probably because the developers are not users of the project, that the project got stolen? So the question is if the reason for the stall is that of the users are not enough developers or out of the users are not enough developers correctly. Okay, this is an issue I see with a lot of projects in this electronic sector because users are not developers here. So especially for Fritzing, these are really beginners. There are no software engineers with this or only a small fraction. Yes, this is an issue here. Please. So the trademark is owned by the public association. But that's it. It's just a trademark. Does that answer your question? Unless you're European and US. It's German. It's a German public association. It's... Okay. Was the question... Oh, sorry, please. Probably the client should have a yearly come together. Yes. So the question is there is this public association which is democratic. So there are people which could come together to make a decision. But the issue is they can't make a decision because they don't just own the brand, not everything. So it's so fragmented that there is no party which could actually decide for just the whole project. Another question over here, please. Who is hosting the website for Fritzing? If I don't understand correctly, it's also a web app. Where is that? Fritzing itself is a desktop application. So the question was... Thank you, Xavier. Who is hosting the website? That's what it said. It's so fragmented. The website is hosted by the limited liability company. And the application itself is QT with C++, obviously. So you can always download it. But, yeah, that's it. I'm not sure why are you afraid of a fork. Because it hasn't been updated in three years. So it's probably going to take one or two years until the binaries won't work. So when you make a new project called Fritz, and it will be the one that is working, it will be like no problem. So why am I afraid of a fork? Because in two or three years, the binaries will just stop working, and then everyone moves to the fork. Yes, maybe, but also maybe the company will just fix the binaries that it starts working again. Then you have another six years of runtime. So that could be an option. And the thing is, most users are totally happy with Fritzing how it works today. So even though there are 1,000 issues open, most users are just satisfied with this. So for the company behind Fritzing, it would be a simple task to just keep it somehow working. But that's not what I see from an open source project. I just want to see some involvement. Another question here. Up over there. I understand that this might sound completely silly, but have you considered asking, serve for health? I mean, what have they done to pike it? I've just seen it was dead in the water by then, like three or four years. Help? It's dead in the water. So to repeat for the audience on the record, the question was, why don't we just ask CERN because there's up to discussion, Kiket wasn't the same situation. Why not? But then please, someone from CERN come to me. I can answer that. Are plans for Kiket are to be used for work? And then use Fritzing. I would see the LHC electronics done with Fritzing. OK, now, do we have time for another question? Xavier? Yeah, please. Actually, you've answered half of it already. I was asked, actually, from those issues, how many people are actually having real problems? Or is it just good enough for people? So those issues, how many are duplicates or requests for new features? Or do you actually have statistics about what people are having problems with? So the question is, out of these 1,000 issues, how many are really important, or are people just satisfied with what Fritzing does? Yes, most people are satisfied with what Fritzing does. And I can't tell you how many of these issues are real bucks or how many are feature requests, because it's not properly sorted. What I would do as a maintainer, honestly, is to take it over and just close all of the issues. Just fucking throw them away and start off from scratch. Because then you can, really, no one would scope through these 1,000 issues. I think, you know, from your day jobs, that when you have a buck tracking with 1,000 open issues, you just say, OK, this issue is fucking 60 years old. No one really cares about this. But this is up to the maintainer. And I believe there must be some maintainer behind it with this pragmatic decision making here. One last question. My question is, wouldn't it be a good cause of action to make sure that the flow of money to these companies getting reduced until they maybe start behaving a little bit more cooperative? I mean, they don't need to be thrown out completely. If they start acting in favor of Fritzing, they could be a part of this new process. But I think the first step is to make clear that all the money is going into the fine, the fine, the fritzing developers mostly. And then maybe they will start thinking about how to cooperate a little bit more. I believe that this company does not really care about fritzing. That's my own opinion. I don't care about the money, maybe. Maybe? I should repeat the question. So there is money flowing to this company. Why don't we just close the valve and drain that company? I say, no, I don't believe that that would help because this company just don't care. So if there is money coming in, that's fine. If not, well, it's that. That's my impression of this. But I hope that someone will, when we start off talking on GitHub, to just interact and maybe give some clear idea on this. OK. If you're trying to contact the limited liability company, did I answer that? The question is, have we tried to contact not the public association, but the limited liability company? We are in contact with them. We have to because we are the fritzing fab and somehow have a relation with them. But what I can tell is that it is really, really difficult to discuss with them. Maybe because there is not a lot of interest to further develop it, I have no clue. All right. Thanks. Sorry. Thank you.
 Are we ready?  We are ready?  Really busy here.  So for my talk, first the shortest claimer,  this is not a technical topic.  Okay, no one's leaving.  Compared to the other topics we had before.  Really. But before I start off with the talk,  I would like to say thank you for Javier for another round this year of organizing the staff room.  And to all the other people like the guy at the camera.  Thank you.  Okay, today I would like to talk to you about Fritzing.  Is anyone here who has not heard about Fritzing before?  Oh great, I thought okay, I asked this question this round because it's probably this way.  Okay.  I talk about Fritzing not because I maintain Fritzing.  Actually I have not a lot to do with Fritzing.  But once my company has to do with Fritzing is that we provide the Fritzing FAP.  And this is really important because I can only give advices.  I do not own the brand.  I do not own the code.  I own nothing.  What I just do is to provide the Fritzing FAP.  So please keep this in mind.  I can only give advices through this talk.  Everything else is up to the Fritzing, this to be discussed later, who is actually on Fritzing.  But first I would like to give a short introduction on Fritzing and what it actually is.  Because you may ask yourself, okay, it is something to draw PCBs, to do technical sketches on electronics.  But how is it like compared to, let's say, a key cat?  There is a huge difference.  This is from the Fritzing Wikipedia page.  And what you notice is that Fritzing is not intended to be used by electrical engineers.  That is a major difference.  It is used for designers, artists, who just want to have a few LEDs blink on their shirt, something like this.  These are people who start off with an Arduino, then hook up some LEDs to the Arduino and continue to grow.  But because of this, I believe that an application like Fritzing is great for key cat 2,  because Fritzing, later in the process, maybe two years later, will head over to QI-CAT.  But this is a process. They start off with Fritzing, do their sketches, do their totally weird PCBs with some strange routing.  It doesn't matter. It's totally fine.  Because of this, Fritzing has this unique breadboard view.  So most of you just say, okay, what crap is this? I can do my routing with this. I just do it.  I can just do a schematic. But for, let's say, artists, this is a great way to have something really already working on your table  and then bring this what you have on your table over to a schematic.  And this is a visual way to do such.  And from this breadboard view, you can go over to doing a PCB layout to what's said here, a more permanent circuit.  So compared to key cat, Fritzing is more like, oh, I already have something which is actually working on my desk.  Now I want to professionalize it. That's a little bit different compared to other traditional EDA tools.  So Fritzing is widely used. How did that happen?  One of the reasons is that whenever you open a book from, let's say, O'Reilly and look for all the sketches within this book  when it's about electronics, of course, they are mostly made by Fritzing.  Because people like this visual breadboard view to just see, okay, they can imagine that is something I can build on my own.  That's why it's so popular in books, lectures, education, also with pupils.  So for really basic electronics. But with everyone who does basic electronics, maybe later get someone who does professional electronics.  And so the result is that right now, Fritzing is used by 200,000 people.  So it is not like the last 10 years. This is right now.  So there was some tracking within Fritzing. So we know that this is true.  But so far, so good. Now it gets a little bit more interesting.  Because Fritzing has a lot of open source applications.  He has a problem. It's not able to find developers, maintainers and such.  How do I know? This probably is the indicators you see in a lot of open source projects.  Open issues, open pull requests.  The project is released three years ago. Okay, two years, I'd say two years. The project has died.  Actually not because a lot of people use it. But there's no development ongoing.  So there is just evidence that there is any development.  So I asked myself, how could that happen? And the first thing was, maybe is there any money missing to pay a maintainer to really care about this project?  So let's see how the Fritzing open source project earns any money to sustain or sustain a new development and to fund the development.  How does that work? On the one side, we have prototype manufacturers.  These are PCBs and EMS services which do PCBs, assembly and such, such as we do.  And we give 10% of every Fritzing sketch which gets paid through us back to Fritzing.  And this is enough to pay like half a developer. And the other thing is partner IC manufacturers.  So whenever you would like to have a part from your company within Fritzing, within the library, there are part manufacturers which pay Fritzing to have their parts in the library.  This for example happens with or happens with SparkFun.  SparkFun has all these tiny breakout boards and SparkFun pays Fritzing for this.  I have no clue about the amount, but there is obviously something going on.  So money is not an issue here.  What is it then?  Oh, this is just another slide how this integration into the FAP looks like.  So the user always has the independence to decide where to manufacture the PCB on the upper.  And we have just a Garber export, but if you hit the fabricate button, you're directly redirected to the Fritzing FAP.  What I, during the investigation, noticed is that there is a flaw in the legal structure of Fritzing.  And what is for me really important is that something like this does not happen to let's say Kikat.  So what happened here?  On the left we have the Fritzing UG which is a German limited liability company.  And on the right is the Friends of Fritzing which is a public association.  All the money goes into the limited liability company.  But there is, or I don't know about any connection between these both parties.  And all the developers and everything is going on here, but here is no money, no funding at all.  And on this side, I have no clue about this.  Maybe Striperson Hooker's, no idea.  And this is something which somehow has to be changed.  I have no clue on how to change this, but this is a situation right now which is like a dead end for an open source application.  Because the right for the Fritzing brand is here, but all the money is over here.  So we ask ourselves what to do next.  And I'm really passionate about this.  First, because my company provides a Fritzing Fab, but more because I believe an application like Fritzing is really necessary  for an ongoing stream of new electrical engineers to get young people interested in this thinking around.  Because this is what Fritzing really is good for.  So one idea which came to my mind is maybe we could do a fork, but I am really afraid of forks.  So this is something like what happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice.  And when I ask my mom, please download some open source software, OpenOffice software,  she will probably look for OpenOffice because she knows OpenOffice.  So it's in the people's mind.  They don't think about LibreOffice.  Everyone here around thinks about LibreOffice because we had FOSSTEM, obviously.  But all the other people in the world think, OK, it's OpenOffice.  And they don't care that it is owned by Oracle.  So this is the same with Fritzing.  If we would start a fork of Fritzing, everyone would just continue to use the former Fritzing.  And we would have to come up with a new name, and I think the name is really great.  So I do not want to come up with a new name.  So this, personally, for me, is not an option here.  Another idea would be that, I believe, maybe it's just necessary to have a maintainer for Fritzing,  which I can't be because that would take the independence out of Fritzing.  I do not want to do that.  But what I or respect if Isla would do is to just pay half time of a maintainer  because I believe with a maintainer there are developers out there which work for Fritzing,  but they are disappointed by how the project is leached right now.  So I believe with a maintainer which is really passionate about Fritzing  and with some support from our side, they could get some traction into this project  because then all the developers, and there are a few out there, would start working on Fritzing again.  That is what I believe.  But totally forget that.  This guy also would have to talk to the original Fritzing team, which is, that's what I can tell, kind of hard.  But at least maybe give it a try.  So this is open for discussion.  Later after 4STEM, I will open up an issue on the Fritzing-Zittab repository  with a link to the recording of this talk to give everyone a short idea  on what the current situation is because I do not want to decide it on my own.  We as a company do not want to decide this on us.  So it is a question to the community also to find someone who feels responsible for this.  And I believe for such a great project there are people who would love to maintain this project.  Thank you.  Thank you.  So we have time for questions.  Have you considered the fact that it's probably because the developers are not users of the project,  that the project got stolen?  So the question is if the reason for the stall is that of the users are not enough developers  or out of the users are not enough developers correctly.  Okay, this is an issue I see with a lot of projects in this electronic sector  because users are not developers here.  So especially for Fritzing, these are really beginners.  There are no software engineers with this or only a small fraction.  Yes, this is an issue here.  Please.  So the trademark is owned by the public association.  But that's it.  It's just a trademark.  Does that answer your question?  Unless you're European and US.  It's German. It's a German public association.  It's...  Okay.  Was the question...  Oh, sorry, please.  Probably the client should have a yearly come together.  Yes.  So the question is there is this public association which is democratic.  So there are people which could come together to make a decision.  But the issue is they can't make a decision because they don't just own the brand, not everything.  So it's so fragmented that there is no party which could actually decide for just the whole project.  Another question over here, please.  Who is hosting the website for Fritzing?  If I don't understand correctly, it's also a web app.  Where is that?  Fritzing itself is a desktop application.  So the question was...  Thank you, Xavier.  Who is hosting the website?  That's what it said. It's so fragmented.  The website is hosted by the limited liability company.  And the application itself is QT with C++, obviously.  So you can always download it.  But, yeah, that's it.  I'm not sure why are you afraid of a fork.  Because it hasn't been updated in three years.  So it's probably going to take one or two years until the binaries won't work.  So when you make a new project called Fritz,  and it will be the one that is working, it will be like no problem.  So why am I afraid of a fork?  Because in two or three years, the binaries will just stop working,  and then everyone moves to the fork.  Yes, maybe, but also maybe the company will just fix the binaries  that it starts working again.  Then you have another six years of runtime.  So that could be an option.  And the thing is, most users are totally happy with Fritzing how it works today.  So even though there are 1,000 issues open,  most users are just satisfied with this.  So for the company behind Fritzing,  it would be a simple task to just keep it somehow working.  But that's not what I see from an open source project.  I just want to see some involvement.  Another question here.  Up over there.  I understand that this might sound completely silly,  but have you considered asking, serve for health?  I mean, what have they done to pike it?  I've just seen it was dead in the water by then,  like three or four years.  Help?  It's dead in the water.  So to repeat for the audience on the record,  the question was, why don't we just ask CERN because  there's up to discussion,  Kiket wasn't the same situation.  Why not?  But then please, someone from CERN come to me.  I can answer that.  Are plans for Kiket are to be used for work?  And then use Fritzing.  I would see the LHC electronics done with Fritzing.  OK, now, do we have time for another question?  Xavier?  Yeah, please.  Actually, you've answered half of it already.  I was asked, actually, from those issues,  how many people are actually having real problems?  Or is it just good enough for people?  So those issues, how many are duplicates  or requests for new features?  Or do you actually have statistics about what people  are having problems with?  So the question is, out of these 1,000 issues,  how many are really important,  or are people just satisfied with what Fritzing does?  Yes, most people are satisfied with what Fritzing does.  And I can't tell you how many of these issues are real bucks  or how many are feature requests,  because it's not properly sorted.  What I would do as a maintainer, honestly,  is to take it over and just close all of the issues.  Just fucking throw them away and start off from scratch.  Because then you can, really,  no one would scope through these 1,000 issues.  I think, you know, from your day jobs,  that when you have a buck tracking with 1,000 open issues,  you just say, OK, this issue is fucking 60 years old.  No one really cares about this.  But this is up to the maintainer.  And I believe there must be some maintainer behind it  with this pragmatic decision making here.  One last question.  My question is, wouldn't it be a good cause of action  to make sure that the flow of money to these companies  getting reduced until they maybe start behaving  a little bit more cooperative?  I mean, they don't need to be thrown out completely.  If they start acting in favor of Fritzing,  they could be a part of this new process.  But I think the first step is to make clear  that all the money is going into the fine,  the fine, the fritzing developers mostly.  And then maybe they will start thinking about  how to cooperate a little bit more.  I believe that this company does not really care about fritzing.  That's my own opinion.  I don't care about the money, maybe.  Maybe?  I should repeat the question.  So there is money flowing to this company.  Why don't we just close the valve and drain that company?  I say, no, I don't believe that that would help  because this company just don't care.  So if there is money coming in, that's fine.  If not, well, it's that.  That's my impression of this.  But I hope that someone will, when we start off talking  on GitHub, to just interact and maybe give some clear idea  on this.  OK.  If you're trying to contact the limited liability company,  did I answer that?  The question is, have we tried to contact not the public  association, but the limited liability company?  We are in contact with them.  We have to because we are the fritzing fab  and somehow have a relation with them.  But what I can tell is that it is really, really difficult  to discuss with them.  Maybe because there is not a lot of interest to further develop it,  I have no clue.  All right.  Thanks.  Sorry.  Thank you.
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Are we ready? We are ready? Really busy here. So for my talk, first the shortest claimer, this is not a technical topic. Okay, no one's leaving. Compared to the other topics we had before. Really. But before I start off with the talk, I would like to say thank you for Javier for another round this year of organizing the staff room. And to all the other people like the guy at the camera. Thank you. Okay, today I would like to talk to you about Fritzing. Is anyone here who has not heard about Fritzing before? Oh great, I thought okay, I asked this question this round because it's probably this way. Okay. I talk about Fritzing not because I maintain Fritzing. Actually I have not a lot to do with Fritzing. But once my company has to do with Fritzing is that we provide the Fritzing FAP. And this is really important because I can only give advices. I do not own the brand. I do not own the code. I own nothing. What I just do is to provide the Fritzing FAP. So please keep this in mind. I can only give advices through this talk. Everything else is up to the Fritzing, this to be discussed later, who is actually on Fritzing. But first I would like to give a short introduction on Fritzing and what it actually is. Because you may ask yourself, okay, it is something to draw PCBs, to do technical sketches on electronics. But how is it like compared to, let's say, a key cat? There is a huge difference. This is from the Fritzing Wikipedia page. And what you notice is that Fritzing is not intended to be used by electrical engineers. That is a major difference. It is used for designers, artists, who just want to have a few LEDs blink on their shirt, something like this. These are people who start off with an Arduino, then hook up some LEDs to the Arduino and continue to grow. But because of this, I believe that an application like Fritzing is great for key cat 2, because Fritzing, later in the process, maybe two years later, will head over to QI-CAT. But this is a process. They start off with Fritzing, do their sketches, do their totally weird PCBs with some strange routing. It doesn't matter. It's totally fine. Because of this, Fritzing has this unique breadboard view. So most of you just say, okay, what crap is this? I can do my routing with this. I just do it. I can just do a schematic. But for, let's say, artists, this is a great way to have something really already working on your table and then bring this what you have on your table over to a schematic. And this is a visual way to do such. And from this breadboard view, you can go over to doing a PCB layout to what's said here, a more permanent circuit. So compared to key cat, Fritzing is more like, oh, I already have something which is actually working on my desk. Now I want to professionalize it. That's a little bit different compared to other traditional EDA tools. So Fritzing is widely used. How did that happen? One of the reasons is that whenever you open a book from, let's say, O'Reilly and look for all the sketches within this book when it's about electronics, of course, they are mostly made by Fritzing. Because people like this visual breadboard view to just see, okay, they can imagine that is something I can build on my own. That's why it's so popular in books, lectures, education, also with pupils. So for really basic electronics. But with everyone who does basic electronics, maybe later get someone who does professional electronics. And so the result is that right now, Fritzing is used by 200,000 people. So it is not like the last 10 years. This is right now. So there was some tracking within Fritzing. So we know that this is true. But so far, so good. Now it gets a little bit more interesting. Because Fritzing has a lot of open source applications. He has a problem. It's not able to find developers, maintainers and such. How do I know? This probably is the indicators you see in a lot of open source projects. Open issues, open pull requests. The project is released three years ago. Okay, two years, I'd say two years. The project has died. Actually not because a lot of people use it. But there's no development ongoing. So there is just evidence that there is any development. So I asked myself, how could that happen? And the first thing was, maybe is there any money missing to pay a maintainer to really care about this project? So let's see how the Fritzing open source project earns any money to sustain or sustain a new development and to fund the development. How does that work? On the one side, we have prototype manufacturers. These are PCBs and EMS services which do PCBs, assembly and such, such as we do. And we give 10% of every Fritzing sketch which gets paid through us back to Fritzing. And this is enough to pay like half a developer. And the other thing is partner IC manufacturers. So whenever you would like to have a part from your company within Fritzing, within the library, there are part manufacturers which pay Fritzing to have their parts in the library. This for example happens with or happens with SparkFun. SparkFun has all these tiny breakout boards and SparkFun pays Fritzing for this. I have no clue about the amount, but there is obviously something going on. So money is not an issue here. What is it then? Oh, this is just another slide how this integration into the FAP looks like. So the user always has the independence to decide where to manufacture the PCB on the upper. And we have just a Garber export, but if you hit the fabricate button, you're directly redirected to the Fritzing FAP. What I, during the investigation, noticed is that there is a flaw in the legal structure of Fritzing. And what is for me really important is that something like this does not happen to let's say Kikat. So what happened here? On the left we have the Fritzing UG which is a German limited liability company. And on the right is the Friends of Fritzing which is a public association. All the money goes into the limited liability company. But there is, or I don't know about any connection between these both parties. And all the developers and everything is going on here, but here is no money, no funding at all. And on this side, I have no clue about this. Maybe Striperson Hooker's, no idea. And this is something which somehow has to be changed. I have no clue on how to change this, but this is a situation right now which is like a dead end for an open source application. Because the right for the Fritzing brand is here, but all the money is over here. So we ask ourselves what to do next. And I'm really passionate about this. First, because my company provides a Fritzing Fab, but more because I believe an application like Fritzing is really necessary for an ongoing stream of new electrical engineers to get young people interested in this thinking around. Because this is what Fritzing really is good for. So one idea which came to my mind is maybe we could do a fork, but I am really afraid of forks. So this is something like what happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And when I ask my mom, please download some open source software, OpenOffice software, she will probably look for OpenOffice because she knows OpenOffice. So it's in the people's mind. They don't think about LibreOffice. Everyone here around thinks about LibreOffice because we had FOSSTEM, obviously. But all the other people in the world think, OK, it's OpenOffice. And they don't care that it is owned by Oracle. So this is the same with Fritzing. If we would start a fork of Fritzing, everyone would just continue to use the former Fritzing. And we would have to come up with a new name, and I think the name is really great. So I do not want to come up with a new name. So this, personally, for me, is not an option here. Another idea would be that, I believe, maybe it's just necessary to have a maintainer for Fritzing, which I can't be because that would take the independence out of Fritzing. I do not want to do that. But what I or respect if Isla would do is to just pay half time of a maintainer because I believe with a maintainer there are developers out there which work for Fritzing, but they are disappointed by how the project is leached right now. So I believe with a maintainer which is really passionate about Fritzing and with some support from our side, they could get some traction into this project because then all the developers, and there are a few out there, would start working on Fritzing again. That is what I believe. But totally forget that. This guy also would have to talk to the original Fritzing team, which is, that's what I can tell, kind of hard. But at least maybe give it a try. So this is open for discussion. Later after 4STEM, I will open up an issue on the Fritzing-Zittab repository with a link to the recording of this talk to give everyone a short idea on what the current situation is because I do not want to decide it on my own. We as a company do not want to decide this on us. So it is a question to the community also to find someone who feels responsible for this. And I believe for such a great project there are people who would love to maintain this project. Thank you. Thank you. So we have time for questions. Have you considered the fact that it's probably because the developers are not users of the project, that the project got stolen? So the question is if the reason for the stall is that of the users are not enough developers or out of the users are not enough developers correctly. Okay, this is an issue I see with a lot of projects in this electronic sector because users are not developers here. So especially for Fritzing, these are really beginners. There are no software engineers with this or only a small fraction. Yes, this is an issue here. Please. So the trademark is owned by the public association. But that's it. It's just a trademark. Does that answer your question? Unless you're European and US. It's German. It's a German public association. It's... Okay. Was the question... Oh, sorry, please. Probably the client should have a yearly come together. Yes. So the question is there is this public association which is democratic. So there are people which could come together to make a decision. But the issue is they can't make a decision because they don't just own the brand, not everything. So it's so fragmented that there is no party which could actually decide for just the whole project. Another question over here, please. Who is hosting the website for Fritzing? If I don't understand correctly, it's also a web app. Where is that? Fritzing itself is a desktop application. So the question was... Thank you, Xavier. Who is hosting the website? That's what it said. It's so fragmented. The website is hosted by the limited liability company. And the application itself is QT with C++, obviously. So you can always download it. But, yeah, that's it. I'm not sure why are you afraid of a fork. Because it hasn't been updated in three years. So it's probably going to take one or two years until the binaries won't work. So when you make a new project called Fritz, and it will be the one that is working, it will be like no problem. So why am I afraid of a fork? Because in two or three years, the binaries will just stop working, and then everyone moves to the fork. Yes, maybe, but also maybe the company will just fix the binaries that it starts working again. Then you have another six years of runtime. So that could be an option. And the thing is, most users are totally happy with Fritzing how it works today. So even though there are 1,000 issues open, most users are just satisfied with this. So for the company behind Fritzing, it would be a simple task to just keep it somehow working. But that's not what I see from an open source project. I just want to see some involvement. Another question here. Up over there. I understand that this might sound completely silly, but have you considered asking, serve for health? I mean, what have they done to pike it? I've just seen it was dead in the water by then, like three or four years. Help? It's dead in the water. So to repeat for the audience on the record, the question was, why don't we just ask CERN because there's up to discussion, Kiket wasn't the same situation. Why not? But then please, someone from CERN come to me. I can answer that. Are plans for Kiket are to be used for work? And then use Fritzing. I would see the LHC electronics done with Fritzing. OK, now, do we have time for another question? Xavier? Yeah, please. Actually, you've answered half of it already. I was asked, actually, from those issues, how many people are actually having real problems? Or is it just good enough for people? So those issues, how many are duplicates or requests for new features? Or do you actually have statistics about what people are having problems with? So the question is, out of these 1,000 issues, how many are really important, or are people just satisfied with what Fritzing does? Yes, most people are satisfied with what Fritzing does. And I can't tell you how many of these issues are real bucks or how many are feature requests, because it's not properly sorted. What I would do as a maintainer, honestly, is to take it over and just close all of the issues. Just fucking throw them away and start off from scratch. Because then you can, really, no one would scope through these 1,000 issues. I think, you know, from your day jobs, that when you have a buck tracking with 1,000 open issues, you just say, OK, this issue is fucking 60 years old. No one really cares about this. But this is up to the maintainer. And I believe there must be some maintainer behind it with this pragmatic decision making here. One last question. My question is, wouldn't it be a good cause of action to make sure that the flow of money to these companies getting reduced until they maybe start behaving a little bit more cooperative? I mean, they don't need to be thrown out completely. If they start acting in favor of Fritzing, they could be a part of this new process. But I think the first step is to make clear that all the money is going into the fine, the fine, the fritzing developers mostly. And then maybe they will start thinking about how to cooperate a little bit more. I believe that this company does not really care about fritzing. That's my own opinion. I don't care about the money, maybe. Maybe? I should repeat the question. So there is money flowing to this company. Why don't we just close the valve and drain that company? I say, no, I don't believe that that would help because this company just don't care. So if there is money coming in, that's fine. If not, well, it's that. That's my impression of this. But I hope that someone will, when we start off talking on GitHub, to just interact and maybe give some clear idea on this. OK. If you're trying to contact the limited liability company, did I answer that? The question is, have we tried to contact not the public association, but the limited liability company? We are in contact with them. We have to because we are the fritzing fab and somehow have a relation with them. But what I can tell is that it is really, really difficult to discuss with them. Maybe because there is not a lot of interest to further develop it, I have no clue. All right. Thanks. Sorry. Thank you.
because it's probably this way. Okay. I talk would like to give a short introduction on this, Fritzing has this unique breadboard view. doing a PCB layout to what's said here, a more tools. So Fritzing is widely used. How did that that right now, Fritzing is used by 200,000 people. So it is not like the last 10 years. This development and to fund the development. How does engineers to get young people interested in this is a question to the community also to find but also maybe the company will just fix the users are just satisfied with this. So for the company behind Fritzing, it would be a simple