ERD Apps a Missing OSS Niche?

Posted by Cliff on Sunday June 30, 2002 @11:22AM from the drawing-lines-and-boxes dept.

Pennyless Developer asks: "So the time comes when one must design a brand spankin' new database schema. You want to use an Entity-Relationship diagramming tool with hopefully some automatic schema generation tools, but do not have much money to purchase anything like Rational Rose. Like a true geek well versed in OSS, you head off to scan sourceforge, freshmeat, and google. But alas, it appears no such applications exist in the OSS world, at least none beyond the planning stage. The question I pose is this: What useful, OSS/Free/Cheap ERD applications have you found and used? Or do developers do all their ERD work under an evaluation period of commercial software?"

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Software Engineering?? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-06-30 12:30 · Score: -1, Troll

First off, this whole topic runs up against the long tradition of code hacking. People don't design 'Open source' software, they wait until a commercial program is developed and then make an Open Source copy of it.

In particular, there's no room in Open Source for 'software engineers.' A true geek sits down in front of his emacs and hacks. Data structures are reverse engineered from other projects or they evolve in email exchanges and mailing lists.