The thing with Open Source is, you learn to use a range of tools.
Of course, the costs do add up. One tool might only be $0, but then you realize that’s $0 *per seat*, and the following month you discover you have to pay another $0 to keep using the tool, and so on every month, or even every week. Pretty soon you find you’re paying $00, or even $000 if you don’t keep your costs under control. It’s just too tempting to add more pieces of software to do more different jobs.
Lots of other pcb cad packages accept PADS files.
As many mechanical design packages accept dwg and dxf and step files.
HiWire (schematics) and smARTWORK (PCBs) were as awesome as they were because they were written by hardware engineers for internal use (Wintek's main products were 8051 dev boards) and later made into products in their own right. As such, I'll bet the code was pretty awful :-) but the programs were a dream to use. with HiWire you just basically thought your schematic onto the screen.
I used HiWire to lay out the ceiling tiles for a kitchen remodel.
If a PCB sells for $5000, and we plan to sell hundreds of them, we'd certainly lose sleep over the $0 cost of the layout tools.
PCB layout software is common and pretty much the same, so is hardly strategic. Cost is minor too.
Our functions and circuits are strategic. And some of our Spice models.
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