D.J. Delorie to work on the gEDA open soirce CAD program PCB

On a sunny day (Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:01:20 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :

Well, maybe a surprise to some, but I have never seen open source as a business model. My first Linux (0.98 IIRC, by SLS 'Soft Landing Systems') came on a CD with (or that was) a computer magazine. It took some work to make it run, but was worth it. Linux for the masses? I have never seen it that way, the masses would have to learn Unix. The masses however, have been made mouse clickers, and command line brain dead, by Billy The Gates.

I guess it is like cars, or maybe not, the human interface has been standardised to steering wheel, gas pedal, blinkers..... Nobody knows how the engine exactly works. Oh, and in Europe you still have manual gears.

For me a computer was just for controlling stuff (electronics), communication, and writing software that could do what I wanted it to do.

I do not know if SLS ever made some money, that magazine went out of business a bit later..

So, anyways, it is safe to release sources for programs that drive hardware that people then have to buy (from you). Like for example a driver for a graphics card, or sound card, or something external to the PC like a machine factory. There you can make money (selling hardware). Of course you can make money by selling support, *if you can give support*. If charged by the hour the bad ones make more money then the good ones. MS would say: Just re-install.....windows. So, but at least the stuff you sell, be it a Linux distro, or some program, should work, and have support until it works. You do not sell a car that does not run, and then ask money to fix it so it does.

But these are strange times, from 50 billion pyramid schemes from the ex head of the NASDAC to presidents invading countries for weapons of mass destruction that they know do not exist, to zillion dollar debts.. And, if you ask me, it has always been that way, there are lions and sheep. Snakes and worms, and bats too. It all keeps itself in balance.

Ah, OK.

Linux is quite clickly these days... when you have companies like Dell pre-installing Linux and getting all the "hard" bits like device drivers set up correctly, at least for basic word processing/web surfing machines, many Windoze users would be perfectly happy -- they get along just fine without the command line in 'Doze, they'll get along just fine without it in 'Nix.

40+ years ago this was largely the model, right? -- Pretty much all software was provided by hardware vendors or written by end-users. Worked fine, but of course today there's a much greater variety of software than there ever was back then due to software development itself becoming a business.

MS actually will give you quite good help... if you pony up for the several-hundred-buck-per-incident support phone lines. :-( (And there's no charge if the problem turns out to be due to a bug, supposedly.) The guys in India making $5/day, though... well... I'm not surprised that the vast majority of them just go through their flowchart that often contains few real solutions and most paths end at, "re-install Windows."

Nicely written, Jan. :-)

---Joel

Please excuse the slight topic drift, but I would like to mention a couple of "wish list" items related to the above projects, just in case you end up working on those parts of the project.

gEDA:

I would like to see better support for the following ways of working on a PCB design:

[1] Let the autorouter do all the easy routes (no sense manually routing a bunch of straight shots from one pin to the next pin over) and then drop into manual routing, rather than manually routing everything. [2] let the software run all weekend trying different autoplace and autoroute attempts. Some old MS-DOS lpCB layout programs did this, and sometimes they would really suprise me by finding a very good solution just by blind luck and trying everything.

gcc:

The Open source FreeBASIC project uses GAS/AS (the GCC assembler) to provide an inline assembly function which is really quite nice, but the last time I checked the GCC assembler does not support the newer SSE and virtualization instructions that the newer Intel processors have. It seems to me like it should be possible to have a user-editable text file that allows me to add new instructions to GAS/AS at will.

Just a couple of ideas that I wanted to throw out there... :)

--
Guy Macon

On a sunny day (Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:13:20 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :

I have this little netbook, eeePC 701. Of course it is now no longer what it was, so much extra soft installed: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/eeepc/ But anyways, I got so sick and tired from clicking 'network', then selecting a connection, then selecting a window to see what it did, and shifting it around so I could actually see it, and then starting a terminal anyways to see if the ppp GPRS link actually found the name servers by typing cat /etc/resolv.conf, and then starting it again in the same way if it did not (weak signal)... that I wrote some script and put it under the Alt Control c key (for connect). Now there is a shortcut to access internet anywhere in the world. I have used some part of there alphabet for hot keys now.... Just got to remember: 'alt ctrl u' is for Usenet ;-) I dunno how other people read Usenet (this I mean), but I use my own reader...

*and it is mouse based*, although I added key binding for somebody some time ago. ftp://panteltje.com/pub/eeepc/NewsFleX2.png

Thank you :-)

This is a perfect example of where people with a specific itch pay someone to scratch it. Sure, it's OSS, and anyone (you, for example) could fix that annoyance. But if no one who is inclined and able to fix it happens to suffer from your problem, it won't get fixed. This is where it's useful to have the option of paid, directed development on OSS projects.

--
Ben Jackson AD7GD

http://www.ben.com/

On a sunny day (Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:17:05 GMT) it happened Ben Jackson wrote in :

Is that not a bit self-contradiction? I think, there are very few issues with this eeePC that have not been addressed yet for free by the open source community:-) Have a look here:

I contributed some myself, although this one (connect key) is so application specific (you have to have some USB modem) that I am not sure that I will add it to the wiki. The problem is, that the *payed* writes of the Xandros Linux for the eeePC, clearly went for a GUI interface. The better faster cheaper solutions come from us free programmers :-)

These should probably go on the gEDA wiki...

The listed work doesn't inlude any autorouter/autoplacer tasks. We had a Google SoC student working on a new autorouter, though.

That would be binutils, not gcc. The latest binutils (cvs on sourceware.org) should have support for all those opcodes.

That would be the source code :-)

I'm not interested in an autoplacer. I am interested in using an autorouter. Is there any autorouter in the current code? Was the Google SoC project successful?

I divide routing into 3 categories, like Goldilocks: easy, medium, and hard.

Small boards that are not dense should be easy to route, especially if they have a lot of small parts and the (manual) placement is sensible. If they are small enough, I'm happy to do them by hand but I shouldn't have to spend my time on easy/obvious stuff.

Hard boards are, well, hard, even for a good/fancy commercial autorouter.

The medium ones are too complicated for a simple autorouter but quick/easy for a good autorouter. I'm willing to do some manual work to help.

The edges between easy, medium, and hard are not crisp. They depend on how long you are willing to wait and/or how good the placement is.

--
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer\'s.  I hate spam.

Yes. It's a gridless rectilinear router, our second generation.

Yes, technically. The code exists as a separate plug-in but we're hoping to find time to integrate it more closely. I wouldn't want the average user to try it out just yet, although the results we get in "controlled environments" are really sweet.

of the NASDAC

know do not exist,

Gee Jan, I don't see anything wrong with DJ getting paid to write software. And we all stand to benefit.

What's wrong with that?

Thanks RH, and thanks DJ.

Cheers, James Arthur

You're welcome :-)

I second the motion.

Me too.

Even if DJ did beat me in the 2007 PIC Circuit Cellar contest! :->

Dave.

IOW: they don't charge you if the help desk can't fix it.

On a sunny day (Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:24:08 GMT) it happened James Arthur wrote in :

of the NASDAC

know do not exist,

There is nothing wrong with that. Just that I will not donate to that project. Or are you against free will ;-)?

of the NASDAC

know do not exist,

I concur. Most people need to earn a living. In the long run it is much better for everyone, if all programmers could write software while being paid, AND have the software being open source. How much good quality code has been lost because it is closed source and have been abandoned for one reason or another ? If the situation is such that commercial companies find it to there benefit to pay for open source development, then in the long run everyone benefits.

Regards Anton Erasmus

It also avoids the following situations:

A hobbyist writes some code, and publishes it on his personal website. A large corporation then distributes binaries with their product, and refers their users to the author's website for the source. The author's website either goes down or gets shut down for drastically exceeding its bandwidth quota.

A less common issue is that the site hosting the source may be less accessible than the one hosting the binaries. E.g. the source may only be available by CVS (which may be a problem if you're behind a firewall or proxy which only allows web and email), or it may be on a shared community site which emphasises free speech, and thus finds itself on the wrong side of filtering proxies.

Hence the GPL's requirement that "equivalent" access means that the source must be available from "the same place" as the binaries.

I'm sure they tested on "a lot" of platforms, but you can't test *all* of them. Microsoft has an unfair advantage here: anyone who makes hardware will test it for Windows. If they didn't, even Microsoft couldn't test Windows against every piece of PC hardware.

It doesn't help when h/w vendors pull tricks like using the same product code for a dozen substantially different versions of the hardware. Of course, they'll adjust the supplied Windows drivers accordingly, but Linux users are left having to read the part numbers on the chips to figure out exactly which product they have.

I'm surprised that so many manufacturers seem to do this. I've always figured it's been marketing-driven -- the marketing guys see that the WRT54G is selling like gangbusters, so they figure it's "risky" to release, e.g., the WRT55G. Still, there could at least release a WRT54Gv2, which to most consumers still says, "better than the first!" and doesn't risk the loss of model recognition.