gEDA-user: Press release: gEDA Project and Linux Fund partner to boost gEDA/PCB usability

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Good news for gEDA users!

Please read the below press release, of interest to all gEDA users.
It has gone out to a variety of EE news sources, as well as mainstream
press release sites.

Cheers,

Stuart


December 15th, 2008

gEDA Project and Linux Fund partner to boost gEDA/PCB usability

Help bring open source circuit board design into the mainstream.

The gEDA Project is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Linux Fund
in a fundraising effort targeted to expedite development of gEDA's flagship
PCB layout program "PCB".  Within this partnership, expert gEDA/PCB developer
DJ Delorie has agreed to implement a set of enhancements designed to upgrade
PCB's usability and utility for electronics designers, making it an attractive
open source alternative to commercial PCB design tools.  With this project,
gEDA/PCB joins the VectorSection DWG interpreter project as part of Linux
Fund's growing open engineering and hardware initiative.

PCB is a twenty year old application. Originally written in 1990 for the Atari
ST, the program was ported to Unix in 1994. Over the years, it has been
maintained and extended by a series of developers who have added improvements
and new features, including the ability to export Gerber RS-274x files, an
autorouter, and a GTK port. Mr Delorie is currently one of the chief
developers involved with PCB, having become involved with the project in
2002.

DJ Delorie is well known within the open source community as the author of
djgpp, a popular port of the gcc compiler to DOS. He is also a long time user
of PCB, having used the program to design a net-enabled alarm clock which won
second place in Circuit Cellar Magazine's "Microchip embedded control" design
contest in 2007. His commitment to work on PCB usability enhancements in
conjunction with funding from the Linux Fund represents a major step forward
for the gEDA Project, as well as a welcome boost to the open-hardware
movement.

gEDA/PCB upgrade work description:

     * Implement forward annotation using action scripts
     * GUI modernization
     * Enhance ability to create and edit arbitrary layer types
     * Develop a new Footprint Editor
     * Update Design Rule Checking


About the gEDA Project

The gEDA Project is a community of open-source developers working on creating
tools for electronic design released under the GNU Public License. The project
currently offers a mature suite of free software applications for electronics
design, including schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials
(BOM) generation, netlisting into over 20 netlist formats, analog and digital
simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout.

Besides the core design tools, the gEDA Project has gathered a community of
other programmers who work on their own tools while sharing the gEDA e-mail
lists, administration, and community support. This extended set of electronics
design applications has become known as the "gEDA Suite".

Visit http://geda.seul.org for more information about the gEDA Project.


About Linux Fund

Linux Fund is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial and
supervisory support to the open source software community. Linux Fund raises
funds with its line of rewards credit cards and direct donations, and has
given over half a million dollars to open source projects since its founding
in 1999.

Visit http://www.linuxfund.org for more information about Linux Fund and to
help support the gEDA/PCB Project.



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