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

[Steve Meier]

I think, which often causes head ackes....

geda is not yet competetive to the comercial eda products.....

companies need tools to get todays job done.....

would it make sense for large electronics companies to invest into
geda....  again at the risk of hurting my head... i think so.  If
nothing else it puts preasure on the commercial eda tool providors.

what would it take to make the sale to large electronics companies.... I
suspect having some minimum capability and from my perspective geda
ain't there yet.

What are these minimum requirements?... good question?... maybe where
some 30% of a companies designes can readily be implemented with geda?
maybe the ability to use the file formats of some of the comercial eda
tools? this is just a guess.
 
Steve Meier



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.
>
> However, the other side of the "free software" coin is that the source
> is available to you to modify and use as you see fit.   Therefore, a
> design business can certainly *hire* a smart high school or college
> kid to work on maintaining and extending gEDA.  For the $7000 you'd
> pay for a seat of Protel/Altium/whatever it is these days, you can get
> much more than a summer job's worth of code customized to meet your
> *exact* needs.  Folks working in electronic design must know somebody
> with high school kids looking for summer work, right?
>
> 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?
>
> Stuart
>
>
>
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