@Dave, as much as I hate to say this compared to altium, orcad or protel all opensource EDA is really a personal play thing because of user base. KiCAD has some disadvantages that to me are kind of glaring but I am more interested in adding things than starting/being in a flame ware. The UI experience of gEDA might feel like a toy if you are new to the *nix way of thinking about things but after you get used to it there are things you realize are possible that would be very hard if no impossible to do in a "modern" integrated GUI. Keep in mind I started out as an electronics hobbyist who took up Linux way later on.
@Circuiteromalaguito there was a meeting this year at FOSDEM in Belgium. The videos are for some reason not posted on their website yet but you can find them here.
https://video.fosdem.org/2015/The project is supposed to be hosted here
http://edacore.org/ You can see the gEDA half of the dialogue here
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/45312The KiCAD part is on a mailing list you have to join yahoo us access here
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/kicad-users/infoThe folks who do circuit simulation where there (icarus, gnucap, ng-spice and etc) as were the EDA people from QUCS, KiCAD and gEDA. One person proposed EDAcore and started a dialogue that has span both the gEDA, KiCAD and newly minted EDAcore mailing lists. It has ebbed and flowed since then. I get the impression a number of us are quietly hacking away at things but no group work has kicked off so far.
I really like the gEDA devs but they have their ideas of how things should go. They have not included a lot of contributions of the years because they were not in the same language as their other code or did not meet their coding standards. To be fair even some of DJ's stuff never got included. This has limited the functionality of the gEDA suite with out these 3rd party widgets. It has however made the suite run very reliably. The PCB tool has had it's issues but with extensive testing it passes. I am hoping that PCB getting doxygen documentation will help speed things along.
There has been talk of incorporating some of CERN's contributions to KiCAD as they were written to be portable between suites. However most people who have looked at the PCB tool that is paired with gEDA will tell you the source is a mess. gEDA and the PCB tool have different origins and PCB's architecture was never so carefully controlled. The gEDA source code I can read the PCB source just confuses the heck out of me. Eventually DJ or one of the Peters pointed out to me that it has no unified concept of what a PCB is. I get the impression from people that KiCAD's PCB tool has architectural issues of it's own though possibly less seriously. I get the impression that basically both groups want to flush out the mess their current code has them in before combining forces.
My *personal* hope in the short term is that we work on compatibility with non-free software formats because right now.
OrCAD - gEDA has this in a limited way (I have never used it). It should get cleaned up and moved to EDAcore so KiCAD can use it.
EagleCAD - CERN is writing import for this into KiCAD but we could move that to EDAcore and add export which would help entice more of the open hardware community to migrate
Protel - The published their file format spec but no one has written a library to interpret it.
Altium - Unlike the others they keep their format closed so we are all waiting on this I guess.
http://hackaday.com/2014/10/15/reverse-engineering-altium-files/PS: The QUCS talk was really good. Even if you don't care about gEDA or KiCAD you might want to watch it.
PPS: In case you think I am just waiting for others to do the work keep in mind I have been quietly working on something for a little while. I will release it when I feel ready. It should ultimately change openocd, gEDA and KiCAD but in a more minor way.