RE: gEDA-user: Free GNU/Linux hardware design tools

["Christian E." Jørgensen <cej@os.dk>]

EATON,JOHN (HP-Vancouver,ex1) wrote:

> There's a BIG difference between supporting questions about why a particular
> netlist doesn't work and why a user generated bitstream doesn't work.
> Releasing
> the details would open up a support can of worms and give the competition a
> lot of
> info about how your chip works.

I think it's great that hardware makers write reference implementations
of whatever software needs to access their hardware and that they choose
to support these implementations. However, it annoys me to no end when
these same hardware makers refuse to release the specifications of their
products so that alternative implementations cannot be created.
Providing these specifications does not in any way obligate the hardware
makers (or anyone else for that matter) to support alternative
implementations based on them.

Cheers,
Christian