Re: gEDA-user: VeriWell now on SourceForge

["Samuel A. Falvo II" <sam.falvo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/29/05, Hagen Sankowski <hsank@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I agree. But your attribute 'abysmal' belongs to a lot of cores I've seen on
> opencores.org both in VHDL and in Verilog. I think there are to less fellows to

This same argument can be applied also towards software on
sourceforge.net too; but does that mean all hosted projects are
"sub-optimal?"  It is not the responsibility of opencores to ensure
high quality designs; they are a hosting provider and a rendezvous
point for other developers.  It is solely the responsibility of the
individual project leaders to ensure the quality of their respective
projects.

> are less people knowing the business than in the area of software. Open
> Source Hardware projects doesn't reach the critical mass quite often therefore.

Precisely because of people who, like you, won't go to opencores
because of perceived quality issues.  Open source exists for a reason:
if you don't like the way a project is working, write and submit some
patches!  Update the documentation!  Do something to contribute back
to the maintainer, so that the quality does arrive over time.  The
whole point being, open source *anything* tends to evolve over time,
and universally starts out as crap to start with.  The original Linux
release was abysmal compared to modern Linux kernels.  Now-a-days,
it's considered one of the premiere examples of what widely
distributed code production can produce, and is known to offer a
serious performance competition against many other kernels, including
AIX, HP/UX, Windows, and even VMS now that some of the high
availability and clustering patches are becoming more stable.

But, doing a grass-roots, all-or-nothing, ground-up redesign of a
module is clearly out of the question.  Incremental changes are the
preferred approach towards evolving either software or hardware,
unless it's REALLY justified.  By the latter, I mean something where a
hardware (or software's) design is so fundamentally flawed or
out-dated that a grass-roots rewrite really *is* the shortest path to
market.  In this case, then yes, go ahead and re-write.

Let me know if that's confusing because, on second re-reading, it
seems like I have a double-standard.  But I can't think of any more
clear to phrase it at this time.

--
Samuel A. Falvo II