Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi --

> What would be fabulous is if gEDA settings could be changed to make
> our front end look 
> and feel like fritzing or as is, or as some particular user wanted.
> Fritzing is probably doing good market research -- getting good feedback
> from a set of users we alienate with our typical comments of "well,
> you just handle all 
> that complexity and stop whining..."

All the comments about Fritzing vs. gEDA are very true.  It would
indeed be nice if gEDA (particularly the gschem -> PCB flow) were more
polished and newbie friendly.

One major difference between gEDA and Fritzing is that Fritzing is a
university project receiving sponsorship from various state
governments in Germany.  That means that they have a paid team who can
work on the software full time.  I just looked at their website again,
and it seems that they have a team of 11+ people working on the
software, including 3 UI specialists.

GEDA is a collection of hobby hackers who work on the software for a
variety of reasons, none of which involves receiving enough financial
support to put bread on the table.  Therefore, it's hard for the gEDA
Project to support the kind of sustained, organized effort required to
create a polished, user-friendly software system.  But what we do have
suits our purposes pretty well!

I'll remind folks that we *do* have a Linux Fund account, and have a
plan for improvements to gEDA/PCB to be started as soon as the account
reaches a reasonable level.  Beyond that, everybody is encouraged to
supply patches to raise up the newbie-friendly level of gEDA.

I know I've been a bad boy w.r.t. making code and documentation
contributions to gEDA for many months.  I've been doing that "put
bread on the table" thing instead of working on gEDA.  However, I did
make my contribution to the LF acct last  year.  Maybe it's time for
me to make another donation.....

Cheers,

Stuart



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