On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 02:57:08PM -0500, Al Davis wrote: > 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.
I have blown a tremendous amount of time at work getting burned by bugs in commercial (high end too) CAD tools. I've also lost quite a bit of time in trying to put together a non-proprietary test case to even feedback. And my experience so far has been rather bad with getting these bugs fixed anyway. I've ran in to a much smaller number of bugs in gEDA and have largely been able to fix them myself faster than creating a non-proprietary test case to ship off to some bozo at a CAD company. > 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. I know the feeling. Thats part of what made me drop matlab in favor of scilab and octave. -Dan --
