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Open Source Engineering Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-than-a-digital-protractor dept.

pipingguy asks: "A long-time subscriber to my piping design/engineering-related discussion list inquired about Open Source engineering software (and expressed an interest in moving to Linux), citing the high cost and often poor customer support of the commercial packages. Since there are quite a few non-Software Engineers reading Slashdot, I thought I'd ask a 'somewhat larger' userbase by posting the question here. What Open Source engineering software is out there and useful?"

1 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. gEDA, SystemC and TinyOS by KarmaPolice · · Score: 5, Informative

    I got my masters degree in engineering (M.Sc. - E) two days ago and for my thesis I used several open source tools designs for electrical engineering.

    A site gathering many tools and aiming to be a complete design and analysis package is, gEDA: GPL Electronic Design Automation.

    Another promising project is SystemC, which is an open source HDL (Hardware description language). The language is C-based and easy to learn (if you know C). With some (very expensive) commercial tools from Synopsys, it is possible to translate SystemC code to VHDL and do synthesis.

    Moving a bit more towards software, but for embedded devices, a project from Berkeley is TinyOS. Completely open source.

    Many things can be done without spending a dime but actual engineering, i.e. a product, does require commercial products before a design can be shipped of to the factory. But a startup can go a long way before spending anything on commercial software, very much like many software companies have done for many years now.