Re: gEDA-user: gEDA gets some great press!

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 02:57:08PM -0500, Al Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 December 2004 01:54 pm, John Eaton wrote:
> > It always irk's me when someone says that Open Source isn't
> > "professional caliber" or lacks user support.
> 
> But remember who said that.  It is just a vendor defending his 
> own product,  It is a vendor of low end cad, that could be 
> threatened by open source.  Although we don't like that, it is 
> really to be expected.

I have blown a tremendous amount of time at work getting burned
by bugs in commercial (high end too) CAD tools.  I've also lost
quite a bit of time in trying to put together a non-proprietary
test case to even feedback.  And my experience so far has been
rather bad with getting these bugs fixed anyway.

I've ran in to a much smaller number of bugs in gEDA and have
largely been able to fix them myself faster than creating
a non-proprietary test case to ship off to some bozo at a
CAD company.

> What really irks me is when educators say that.  Too many 
> schools with EE programs use only proprietary software and 
> black box proprietary hardware.  Often they use the "free" 
> version of proprietary software, that is crippled so it is just 
> adequate for homework assignments, then they back down on the 
> material taught to make it fit the crippled software.  Then at 
> the senior/grad level, they buy the full version, but only for 
> the lab, so the students need to actually go to the lab to do 
> simple simulations.  They live in the lab, just to use 
> proprietary software.  Then they graduate, and can't rerun 
> their own lab experiments because they don't have the 
> proprietary software, or the license expired.  I will shut up 
> now.
 
I know the feeling.  Thats part of what made me drop matlab in
favor of scilab and octave.

-Dan

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