On Tuesday 14 December 2004 01:54 pm, John Eaton wrote: > It always irk's me when someone says that Open Source isn't > "professional caliber" or lacks user support.
But remember who said that. It is just a vendor defending his own product, It is a vendor of low end cad, that could be threatened by open source. Although we don't like that, it is really to be expected. We really should take that as a challenge. Take a critical look at our own stuff, and ask what it would take to make it truly "professional caliber". In particular, look at how the tools interact. What really irks me is when educators say that. Too many schools with EE programs use only proprietary software and black box proprietary hardware. Often they use the "free" version of proprietary software, that is crippled so it is just adequate for homework assignments, then they back down on the material taught to make it fit the crippled software. Then at the senior/grad level, they buy the full version, but only for the lab, so the students need to actually go to the lab to do simple simulations. They live in the lab, just to use proprietary software. Then they graduate, and can't rerun their own lab experiments because they don't have the proprietary software, or the license expired. I will shut up now.
