The fine doesn’t need to be a significant portion of their earnings, just like a parking ticket needn’t be a significant portion of your wealth. It just needs to be high enough that the action that caused it makes them less than the act of not doing that.

Not only should they be proportional but they should have an exponentially increasing rate for reoffense of the same or similar crime with a cooling off period for the escalation of a year or two.

Fines should never be a 'cost of doing business's for anyone. They should sting and dissuade offenders from reoffending.

Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.

This isn't true in my experience. Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens tools all use local license files or license servers (mainly FlexLM). Updates are just downloaded from their website.

I call that EDA for brevity

> Can you do that with KiCAD?

Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)

The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?

Is this actually because of legal requirements, or because of reality?

Nobody with access to a bleeding-edge node is using vastly inferior FOSS tools that can't actually work with a brand new fab PDK (which was produced specifically for Synopsys or Cadence tools.)