I can't let the following go by, though:
'The gEDA software is "an interesting project" but is not "professional caliber," said Ian Suttie, vice president of sales and marketing at Electronics Workbench. "While gEDA has lots of primitive functionality, it does not provide a clean, optimized user interface of the sort professional engineers demand. Neither does gEDA software provide some of the functionality essential for professional use."'
I bought the schematic entry/pcb/autorouter package a few years from Electronics Workbench. It crashed frequently for me, had problems with new part design, and in general frustrated me so much that I gave up using it. I would specifically not associate the words "professional caliber" with that software. Granted, this is a sales and marketing person, and perhaps the software has been improved tremendously and is now "professional caliber," but it did give me a laugh reading this.
It is a pleasure using open-source tools such as PCB, and my thanks go out to the folks who have put so much time and effort into the tools.
--Dale Grover
(So far, two 4-layer boards successfully fabricated by PCBExpress using PCB software under Mac OS X)
At 10:54 AM -0800 12/14/04, John Eaton wrote:
Ales Hvezda wrote:
Hi All,
Thought I'd pass this along:
http://www.eedesign.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=55301354
Many thanks to all who contribute and use gEDA.
-Ales
Good article.
It always irk's me when someone says that Open Source isn't "professional caliber" or lacks user support. CAD software is complex and everyone has bug's and anomilies. gEDA is no worse than some of the stuff I had to pay for. Commercial vendors are always trying to cram in more new features and want to lock in their users . Open source is much more aligned with the end user's best interest and doesn't play those games.
I have had supported comercial software where you call them and say "your tool doesn't work when I do this" and they respond " don't do that".
John Eaton
