> "Academics (in the UK) is there any effort towards making free-libre software available through collaboration of different institutes?"
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:
I recently did a short electronics course (I made a PIC-based board from surface mount electronics! Without sneezing!), and we did the PCB design stage in EAGLE, and it was basically buggy as hell. We were recommend to keep saving in case it crashed (it did), and if bits of our design appeared to mysteriously vanish, we should change the zoom level to see if they came back, due to render bugs...
...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).
EAGLE is terrible. It is not only bizarre and unnecessarily complex, but also buggy. It is free, but only for the smallest of projects, and if you get to a certain board size or a number of layers, it suddenly becomes quite expensive.
In my opinion, KiCad is already better than EAGLE even not taking the price into account.
I work in the field (another particle accelerator) and I'll tell you outright that a non-commercial license is a no-no for research institutes.
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.
> "I'll tell you outright that a non-commercial license is a no-no for research institutes."
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.
I assure you it makes a lot of sense and is practiced by several labs from around the world.
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.
> Also, a non-commercial license restrict sharing between labs, or even use for some entities that work as government contractors.
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.
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:
https://cadsoft.io/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAGLE_(program)