PCB CAD

[Don Prescott]

Re........

These tools are written

*for*, and used *by* folks at the low and middle segments of the CAD
marketplace. They are ideal for students, hobbiests, educators, and
small-time consultants

You wrote an awful lotta stuff, but then agreed with what I said...
YES, open source CAD applications are probably OK for "students,
hobbiests, educators, and small-time consultants". Generally
speaking, nobody uses these sort of products when you need to get a
commercial product out the door.....(mission critical). Why
not...???? 'cos you're much more concerned with the $$$KKK than
playing around with some home-grown piece of code...

Oh.... please don't tell me about apache and linux (again), thems was
never what I was talking about...

Prescott

 

[David]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 06:23:01 -0800, Don Prescott wrote:

Re........

These tools are written
*for*, and used *by* folks at the low and middle segments of the CAD
marketplace. They are ideal for students, hobbiests, educators, and
small-time consultants

You wrote an awful lotta stuff, but then agreed with what I said...
YES, open source CAD applications are probably OK for "students,
hobbiests, educators, and small-time consultants". Generally
speaking, nobody uses these sort of products when you need to get a
commercial product out the door.....(mission critical). Why
not...???? 'cos you're much more concerned with the $$$KKK than
playing around with some home-grown piece of code...

Oh.... please don't tell me about apache and linux (again), thems was
never what I was talking about...

You are the one who has been generalising about all open source software
being inferior to commercial products, with comments such as "Who in there
[sic] right mind would consider using an open source wordprocessing
package or spreadsheets instead of the commercial products like Word and
Excel". As long as you continue to mix in such absurd claims, you'll get
appropriate counter-claims.

There are relatively few people who have the money to buy top
commercial EDA applications and yet choose to use open source software -
no one is disputing that. But there are a few such users, and the base is
growing along with the quality and usefulness of gEDA and friends.
Projects such as linux, apache and open office make it perfectly clear
that, in general, open source software can be at least as good (and often
far better) than commercial software. Successful companies like MySQL
demonstrate that it is possible to make a good business from making and
selling open source software. How successful open source software will be
in the EDA market remains to be seen - it is likely to make increasing
inroads at the low end, with little effect at the high end.

> Prescott

 

Are we really discussing whether open source is a viable option for
mission critical development?

Has anyone ever used emacs to write source code to tape out a chip, or
write a line of C++ or assembler for a shipped executable? And how
would that C++ have been compiled, nobody uses a GNU compiler right?
How many boards, chips, executables can anyone really ship without
touching an open source tool along the way? I bet there aren't that
many.

Check out the Altera website. They have 14,000 (paying) customers and
made over $800 million last year. Or the Xilinx website. A swarthy
group of "mission critical" customers gave them 1.4 billion last year.
Each of them _ship_ cygwin and GCC as part of their development flow.
Last I checked, those tools are open source.

I have an idea - just the one, I'm good for one a day and this is it.
Rather than throwing rocks, why don't the folks who think closed source
is a good idea try rationalizing it. Make a case for it - what are
it's inherit benefits? How are customers better off when they use it?
Stop making a case against open source development - it's not worth
your time, right? Start making a case _for_ closed source.

If we all listened when someone said, "you can't do that", we'd never
do anything.

Chris


Don Prescott wrote:

Re........

These tools are written
*for*, and used *by* folks at the low and middle segments of the
CAD
marketplace. They are ideal for students, hobbiests, educators,
and
small-time consultants

You wrote an awful lotta stuff, but then agreed with what I said...
YES, open source CAD applications are probably OK for "students,
hobbiests, educators, and small-time consultants". Generally
speaking, nobody uses these sort of products when you need to get a
commercial product out the door.....(mission critical). Why
not...???? 'cos you're much more concerned with the $$$KKK than
playing around with some home-grown piece of code...

Oh.... please don't tell me about apache and linux (again), thems was
never what I was talking about...

Prescott