PCB layout software

Well, annual maintenance contracts on software are usually 10-20% of the purchase price, and within reason that gets you as much support as you'd like.

With something like Eagle, that probably translates into perhaps $10-$20/hr. With Cadence tools, that's probably $40-$60/hr.

So I think a company that was using gEDA in a business capacity should be prepared to pay, say... $30-$50/hr and expect to receive reasonably competent help.

I'm not offering anything, though -- I've never used gEDA for any real projects. :-)

---Joel

There is much better guarantee of getting support for a project from Open Source community than for anything from a commercial vendor. And if everthing else fails one still have the source code. Without any DRM crap and any other strings attached.

How much are you ready to pay?

yeh, it's hard to see that it's a good business plan to make it impossible for people who have used a cracked version to do the right thing and buy a license

-Lasse

st

? To get this you have to

I would assume that it is because RS pays who made the software a per user license fee, so they have to keep track of how many licenses they have to pay for.

And they'd of course like to get you name, company and address because they want to sell you stuff, they don't just do becuase they are nice guys.

-Lasse

get this you have to

Which is equally stupid because I am already registered with RS - you would think they would have a way for registered RS customers to one click install.

Ian

gEDA is currently free, and we give free support (within reason) on the mailing list and IRC... so it sounds like we're in the ballpark :-)

Darn. So close, too. Everything I design is 3" X 4" or under. Anything available for that?

mike

Are you sure that you are not doing 4"x3"? Most PC screens are 4:3 ratio. Why would you design PCB in 3:4?

st

ity

y to

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It's actually a version of the popular Easy-PC package.

Dirk Bruere at Ne>Well, the moral of the story is simple

EAGLE *used* to have a niche all to itself: Folks could upload their full-sized project files and other folks e.g. hobbyists could use Cadsoft's demo version to *view* them and even print them.

Since Cadsoft added that damned infection to their software, any file that re-uses any component built with a cracked copy won't open (as legit customer Marcus found out the hard way). It **doesn't** warn you when you go to **add** the part

--LATER, the file just stops working

--even if you're a fully-paid Cadsoft customer. Showing, once again, that DRM'd software punishes legit users.

...and if you do use one of the known cracked copies of EAGLE, it's obvious that you can't share any of your electronic documents.

The smart thing to do is just avoid Cadsoft's DRM-infected crap.

Express PCB.

I'll bear that in mind when looking for a "full" version of a layout package. Probably something that can import Eagle files.

Only during technical discussions ;) What happened is some brilliant kid in Finland came up with a decent kernel and not many developers bothered with Stallman's Hurd project. But the GNU side supplies most of the unix-like toolbox apps that come with Linux, including the compiler.

What many forget is Linux is more than an OS, it includes complete development facilities for lots of languages, stuff you'd pay heaps extra for from MSFT.

Trouble is, you pay in time learning the tools, and quality varies. Of course people are encouraged to 'give back' to the community, but not many have the time or inclination.

I wish I'd met unix much earlier, like in the '80s -- but problems then were the turf battles on who owned what, so we have no unix biggies to balance MSFT (who used to have their own Xenix distro).

And still, Stallman must dream of getting Hurd off the ground, I can't imagine it happening. Most of the work on the linux-kernel is adding drivers for new hardware, could you imagine that effort split to another OS too?

But, a lot of people are windows refugees, looking for a free replacement OS 'cos MSFT enforce their copyright a bit tighter.

Freeware? Quality varies. I'm putting off choosing CAD package for a while, doesn't seem there's a clear cut winner. But some of those 'free' offerings like DesignSpark and Eagle are too good to be true. At least I got a 2GB flash for registering DesignSpark. Doubt I'll use it though, unless the libraries are rally good, or there's import/export tools. Damned if I'm going to build a set of components and have to repeat that in six months or something.

Grant.

Yep. I can definitely feel for Stallman a bit there -- GCC was certainly just as big of an undertaking as the Kernel (at least it Linus originally built) itself was. Add Emacs onto that and it's clear Stallman deserves rather more recognition than he typically gets.

Microsoft now gives away a low-end version of their development tools -- Linux is probably largely responsible for that.

Ironically, part of the culture seems to be to dislike distributions that become successful -- particularly commercially so: Look at the backlash that both Red Hat and now Ubuntu face. That kind of self-limiting certainly doesn't help to displace Microsoft are the dominant desktop OS...

At least the Gnome and KDE guys understand that making developers work to support two separate platforms is futile, and have agreed on things like how installers should create icons. And there's ...whatever the project is called... whereby most everyone agrees on the major parts of the root directory layout, which is good.

Yeah, I don't see that happening.

---Joel

Heh. It is a paradox.

I'll agree that resentment of their success is puzzling (though I can see folks not preferring RPM or the RH directory structure).

Shuttleworth has brought a lot of that on himself. Change for the sake of change is irritating. (Can you say *Window buttons moved for no good reason*?)

...and a tunnel vision focus on 6-month delivery schedules gets to be very much like The Borg who have a reputation for shoving things out the door half-done. The fact that several distros which used to be Ubuntu-based have migrated to a Debian base demonstrates a preference for quality over quantity.

What gets up my nose is that *ubuntu is only yet another Debian derivative, nothing new but the packaging and the advertising.

And it so happens Debian is a distro that I never got to like, simply because my mindset was elsewhere. That's part of why there are so many distros, choice. But there's only a few 'original' ones around. Some distros seem too difficult to me, Debian, Gentoo, Suse, the non-Linux *BSDs, OpenSolaris. Tried them, not worth changing to, *for me*. And that's the key, there's not one distro going to suit everyone. Oh, and Fedora is Redhat's public beta for their commercial offerings. I've tried Fedora, no thanks.

Redhat was my first distro, problem there is simply they botched up after about release 6.1, I ran 6.2 for a few years, skipped 7 and 8, release 9 was so bad I surveyed the distros and settled on slackware, another of the early distros that tries to be unix-like. It's not perfect, but it's easy to workaround the odd issue that comes up.

Hmm, sorry, OT for PCB layout tools, I've yet to get my matrix board prototypes going to move to PCB, though there's some product coming up that has to be SMD layout, plus so many new chips are SMD only, so I'll get there eventually. Will look at both 'doze and Linux offerings, there some spinoffs under Linux where one could script database extractions and stuff, maybe. But I'm happy using both OS, take the best from either, can't work with only one machine.

Grant

There are some from "board houses" that require that you use that board house. OK but not impressive. Then there is the tools in Kicad and gEDA.

How good is the windows version of KiCad ? do you use it, is it really usable ?