Re: gEDA-user: pcb component layers

["Duncan Drennan" <duncan.drennan@xxxxxxxxx>]

> If you really must have this feature, have you considered paying
> somebody (either one of the PCB developers or an independent
> consultant) to generate a patch to add this functionality to your copy
> of PCB?

Yes I have. I actually think that this is a very valid and viable way
of advancing the state and quality of gEDA. I would rather put money
into gEDA which benefits many people, than pay license fees for a
large commercial package. I would even like to see a process/fund set
up to facilitate contributions and how they are used.

To personally put in the coding effort seems inefficient - I am more
productive designing products than developing software that I know
little about.

It is important to understand which problems are the most relevant to
solve before throwing money at them, and then to solve those within
the context of the development community. To find someone to write a
patch that works for me is far less valuable than finding a solution
which benefits the entire community. Using this enquiry as an example:
if I developed a patch which extended the file format and allowed for
the extra layers, but the developers all hated how I did it the effort
would be wasted as it does not benefit the entire community. You can't
please everyone, but working with the developers, rather than in
isolation, seems like a good place to start.

To do this effectively in an open source community means starting
discussions and generating interest in the features that you think are
relevant. As soon as there is interest around a certain problem and it
is clear that there is a need for certain solutions people become
willing to prioritize those for the benefit of the entire community.
Hopefully once it is clear what needs to be done a monetary value can
be attached to it.

So when I ask who the active developers are, and how to start a
discussion around a certain feature/problem it means that I want to
try to find out how much interest there is in solving a particular
issue, as well as address that issue in the context of this community.
As soon as there is a clear definition of what needs to be done, and
there is buy-in from the community, then a coder can be paid to
resolve the issue (if it hasn't already been by one of the
contributors).

I believe that the benefits of open source EDA are far greater than
the benefits of closed source commercial options, and would rather
invest money in this community than in commercial software. I even
recently posted a blog post about the benefits of open source EDA,
http://blog.engineersimplicity.com/2008/11/open-source-eda.html .


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