Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/09/11:32:49
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Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de> writes:
> Generally activity in Free Open Source seems to shrink since a few
> years
I don't see that at all. Quite the contrary. While it is true that
there has been an exponential increase in the amount of corporately
sponsored "open source" activity that has a somewhat different character
than traditional "free software" work, there's still growth in the
latter. There's massive growth in the hobby side of open hardware,
where a "just give it all away" mentality is in full force for both
hardware and software. Not quite what my old-school, "motivations
matter" and "it's all about freedom" self would most like. But
certainly not something to get depressed about!
> For most people cheap is good enough
Sad, but true. I personally see quite a bit more interest in KiCAD with
the new/impending/whatever release, though. They're moving fast and are
likely to suck in more of the Eagle crowd over time, I think?
> I have learned in the last years that people really hate GTK.
Yes.
> But generally, EDA development is not that hard today. With a fine
> language, a fine GUI and good libraries a good EDA tool set can be
> developed in only a few thousend hours I guess. GUI may be the main
> problem, GTK is only accepted for Linux/Unix today. Native Mac or
> Windows GUI maybe instead? Or Android, HTML5?
Keith and I eventually realized that Java really is the best available
answer for "desktop" UI development, which is why all our ground station
software is written in Java. Since source tree hosted on Debian that we
can deliver objects for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android from. There
are always things to complain about, but it works out *really* well. For
the curious, you can learn more here:
http://altusmetrum.org/AltOS
http://altusmetrum.org/AltosDroid/
To the larger problem, I personally find that I'm just too busy *using*
gEDA tools to spend much time working on them. Every product from Altus
Metrum was designed and manufactured using a gschem->pcb workflow, we've
shipped thousands of board sets, and are now a profitable small open
hardware business. Pretty cool! You can find all of our published
designs on git.gag.com in the various hw/ repositories. Our "shared
library" of schematic symbols and pcb footprints used by almost
everything else is in the hw/altusmetrum repo.
Keith did write a tiny bit of code to shrink pads so that we could be
more successful using a hobby-grade cutter to make paste stencils that I
don't think has ever gotten merged, but we use it routinely with great
results.=20
Bdale
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