gEDA (GPL'ed Electronic Design) In EE Times

Stuart Brorson writes "At long last, today's EE Times published an article about the gEDA project. The gEDA project has developed a mature, GPL'd, Linux-based suite of tools useful for electronic design. Using the gEDA tools, you can take a circuit design from schematic capture, through simulation, to PC board layout and fab. Some example PCBs done using gEDA include the Darrell Harmon's single board computer, and the 'free hardware' Ronja Project. Happily, the advantages of open-source for electronics design were well presented in the article. It's good to see that gEDA is getting some well-deserved press for the excellent work which has been going on from over six years now!"

Comments

the "gimp sux" argument applied to gEDA

[bani]

omg gimp sux because it doesnt do everything photoshop does, everything gimp produces is amateurish and will never be as professional as anything made with photoshop, gimp is free only if your time is worthless, etc. kthxbye

omg gEDA sux because it doesnt do everything (some commercial product does), everything gEDA produces is amateurish and will never be as professional as anything made with (some commercial product), gEDA is free only if your time is worthless, etc. kthxbye

Re:the "gimp sux" argument applied to gEDA

[shokk]

Thank you! I agree!
The fact is that there are plenty of tiny details in all the vendors tools that create margin errors in all designs. The freeware stuff has no hope of catching up given the lack of budget and lack of serious users.

Give it time, you say? Give it all the time in the universe, and you'll still have vendors backed by real chip designers working with real fabs like TSMC and UMC spending real money to iron out those little details. Coming from an EDA background, I can tell you that support on our products is money well spent. When crunch time comes, our EDA software vendors pay attention to bug reports as there are millions of dollars riding on a tiny miscalculation and it gets fixed damn quick for *all* their customers. To top it off, Moore's law says you have 18 month to *MASTER* the current technology before you are left in the dust.

Cute idea, but I liken this to GPL software for running nuclear reactors. I don't think so. Let's get serious, kids.