On Saturday 27 August 2005 03:21 am, David MacQuigg wrote: > The discouraging thing about the EDA tools situation is that no matter > how loudly design engineers complain about the poor quality of the > proprietary tools they are using, there is very little interest in > participating in an open-source project. They just can't see how it > would ever do what their expensive tools do now.
Yes. I think this is analogous to the problems with word processors and office workers. The concern is driven I think by a fear of incompatibility. It's certainly difficult to deal with the reality that many people in business insist on distributing information in whatever nasty variant of .doc format their word processor happens to spit out, and it's not easy to be sure you can read it. Similarly, if you can't read AutoCAD formatted CAD files in a mechanical design business, you're basically screwed. That's a strong motivation to keep using AutoCAD no matter how awful the program itself is. It will take a really big, long-term push by a fair number of interested people to give a free alternative a chance against such an entrenched existing proprietary application. In the long term, it would be worth it, but a lot of people have to back it for a long time, and that's hard to organize. > There is a similar lack of interest in the academic community. None > of this is likely to lead to publications in scholarly journals. I'm confused by what you meant by this. Are you saying that academics are afraid of using or creating open source CAD tools, or that they have a lack of interest in tools development, because it won't generate papers (directly anyway)? -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
