Re: gEDA-user: Marketing gEDA - was - Re: Professional PCB help using geda?

[Igor2 <igor2@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, DJ Delorie wrote:

>
>> DJ, so a slowly growing base is more preferable to a rapidly growing
>> user base and I should not try encourage people to give gEDA a try
>> on a wholesale level ?
>
>It depends.  For example, getting a school, classroom, or other
>organization to try it as a group is different than getting the same
>number of people to try it individually.  As a group, they can work
>together to solve many of their individual problems and share
>solutions, feeding only the worst problems to us.

I did exactly this a year ago and will do it again this semester. My
"input" is mechanical engineer students who choose to take an exotic tour
in electronics (very basic, blinking leds, a PIC hooked on serial line of
the PC doing something simple, etc). I use gschem, xgsch2pcb and pcb on 
Debian/GNU Linux for these. My experience is that for average students the
UI itself is less problematic than a non-windows system. I'm lucky because
these guys haven't used other EDA tools before so it's not like they
expect some sort of UI "standards", however they usually have experience
with 2 or more mechanical engineering CAD software. 

My experience about the developers and gEDA community in general is
positive. Whenever I asked for a feature or submitted a patch, sooner or
later it was done in the repository. I have only one pending feature
request which keeps me back from finishing my scripting plugin for PCB :)

Igor2



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