Sometimes I envy that although I am not a SWE. I work in a field that is so close with the open source and tech scene that we don't have to rely on commercial products like some other fields. It is hard to compete or gain enough interest in some fields of engineering to any open or free solutions.
In which fields can one rely on open source?
To name few that I am aware of.
- Particle Physics
- Astrophysics
- Genomics
- Quantum Chemistry
- Molecular Chemistry
- Robotics
- Geospatial analysis
- Epidemiology
- Medical imaging
Even in particle/astrophysics we rely on proprietary FPGA Vendor tools, in proprietary electronics design tools (ok, kicad is seeing increasing adoption), and often proprietary embedded tools (depending on the microcontroller vendor). Not to mention proprietary graphics drivers (CUDA), CAD tools (Solidworks, Solidedge), mechanical or e&m simulation (comsol, Ansys, xfdtd, wipl-d, etc). A fair number of people use IDL or Matlab too and mathematica is pervasive among theorists. Probably nobody uses Origin
anymore. We've gone backwards on documents since everybody is using overleaf now. It's true most of the software we develop, if made public, is open source.
Yes there are still pockets of proprietary tools but is of limited usage. Most of people in the field is not going to use them (because they don't work on these things). And most of these tools are tied to the hardware and there is increasing adoption like you said for kicad and FreeCAD. There are two exceptions which are theorists love for Mathematica and CUDA for GPU programming on NVIDIA GPUs. For CUDA, it is not bad as you don't pay per usage or don't have contacts, you do this because you purchased NVIDIA GPUs. Which is the best in the world for the use case we have in particle physics experiments. I have never seen someone in the HEP community or Astrophysics using Matlab.
Regarding overleaf, it is open source and you can self-host the community edition for free or self-host professional instance and pay subscription.
Matlab users certainly exist, though they are much rarer than 15-20 years ago (before python was a suitable alternative). For signal processing, matlab still has has advantages over e.g. scipy.signal, which has not yet reimplemented all matlab functionality.
I didn't realize Overleaf was open source (or at least open core...)
And FreeCAD can't yet even effectively render many of the parts for my experiments :(