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

[Stuart Brorson <sdb-at-NOSPAMcloud9_dot_net>]

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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