CERN had a major role in making kicad what it is today. they implemented tons of complex stuff that you normally only find in really expensive CAD tools.
Hope they can repeat that with a few more FOSS projects!
Would be nice to push up also the other parts of the physical design - LibreCAD[1] and FreeCAD[2], Yosys[3] and Symbiflow[4], Chisel/FIRRTL[5], and many others.
CERN has really done wonders to revive the project and get it organized again. Before that, the 2012 build became the last sane build from the project team for a few years. The project appeared to have lost steam and began to fragment. You had to download "latest" windows builds from some random server. Linux distributions stopped packaging at the 2012 build making it appear as if kicad was dead. This forced you to find a 3rd party package or build from source. Then there were a few forks to add features started by random individuals which were always unstable. Component names were renamed with stupid and confusing names to the point where I stopped using it. It almost looked like the project was dead at that point and this was 2014/15.
I recently picked it back up to investigate and was pleasantly surprised. It felt like the team dearly missed the sanity of 2012 version, continued from there and modernized it. Thank you CERN.
Aisler.net, a German boardhouse, makes a donation to kicad for every kicad designed pcb you order there and it's my favourite way to pay for open source.
They literally get paid the moment value is created from using their software. It's beautiful.
Hope they can repeat that with a few more FOSS projects!