GEDA development .... was:Re: gEDA-dev: pcb FAQ: how many layers?

[John Doty]

On May 5, 2007, at 6:25 AM, Stuart Brorson wrote:

> I was thinking about this one last night....
>
> On Fri, 4 May 2007, David Cary wrote:
>> Dear gEDA developers,
>>
>> Recently I overheard some people talking about gEDA.
>> One of them brought up all kinds of reasons that gEDA was not  
>> "usable".
>
> [.....  snip ....]
>
>> Maintainability is at the mercy of the gEDA developers.
>
> I'm not going to argue that a business should place development of its
> critical design tools into the hands of a bunch of hobbiests.  I can
> understand the primal fear which this can trigger in the minds of
> middle managers (rightly or wrongly).
>
> However, it does raise an interesting issue:  If you see "free
> software" merely as zero cost software -- "gettin' sumptin' fer
> nuttin'" -- then, sure, you're at the mercy of the gEDA developers,
> and must beg and whine for feature requests.

That's proven pretty merciful. I recall you once fixed a bug that was  
critical for me in less than 24 hours. Thank you again.

On the other hand, if you get software from a big vendor, support  
tends to be pretty lousy. With Viewlogic, I'd struggle to find  
someone in support who understood what the bug was, and a year later  
a new release would replace it with a new bug that I'd have to figure  
out and work around. gEDA is simply better.

In a real free market maybe you'd get what you pay for, but the EDA  
business is an oligopoly, and those tend to behave badly. Free  
markets only emerge when the customers stop believing "you get what  
you pay for" and start looking for bargains. gEDA is a real bargain.

>
> I don't know why commerical enterprises think they can't become
> active participants in development of gEDA.  Maybe they are so used to
> being supine receivers of whatever the EDA vendors dish out that they
> have forgotten how to take control of their own tools?   But isn't
> there some competitive advantage to having control over your own
> design flow?

Yes. I'm experiencing the flip side of that. I intended Noqsi  
Aerospace to be a broad science and engineering consultancy, but EDA  
is taking over, partly because gEDA is so effective.

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
jpd at noqsi.com