On Tuesday 05 December 2006 15:01, Stuart Brorson wrote: > I think RedHat has already cornered that market!
only for IT like stuff, not EDA. I can see sort of a cooperative business model, where companies would buy in and fund it in exchange for prioritizing what they need. Years ago, all of the big electronics companies that were innovators had their own internal CAD groups. Some still do. Some that let their CAD groups go are regretting it. They are finding out that having their own was a significant competitive advantage. Now they are finding that putting a significant portion of their "intellectual property" in the hands of the likes of Mentor, Synopsys, and Cadence might not be such a good idea. Going to a conference like ICCAD, it is interesting to hear the opinions of "open-source". Of course, the big CAD companies say it is not an issue. Others say in 5 years it will be all open-source. I see a business opportunity in providing "corporate cad" services to small companies, based on free tools, with the money paying for development of those free tools. It is interesting to hear the reaction to this from the existing companies. The big EDA companies (except Mentor) do not see it as a threat to their business. The small consulting companies do not see it as threat either, they see potential partnerships. The only ones that see it as a threat are the ones the seem to have some get-rich-quick scheme. They have some kind of invention and a patent or two and hope to be acquired by one of the big guys. They are furious about it, even though their product is often built as a proprietary extension to some BSD licensed program. Another business opportunity is to sell CAD systems, ready to go, complete with the hardware. Each one is custom. Considering all of the parts that are available, it seems easy to do. There are already lots of businesses that do this for IT applications. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
