X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2017 15:25:42 +0100 (CET) X-X-Sender: igor2 AT igor2priv To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Debug: to=geda-user AT delorie DOT com from="gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu" From: gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu Subject: [geda-user] pcb-rnd says good bye to gEDA (part 2) Message-ID: User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (DEB 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Hello geda-users, Part 1: what's happening now. I started a process back in autumn 2016: I began to increase the distance between pcb-rnd and gEDA. This was a gradual process. My project, pcb-rnd, started as a "pcb fork with a few minor changes" back in 2013. It evolved from a one-person "pcb fork with a lot of changes" and "pcb fork with major upgrades" to an independent pcb editor on its own right, developed by a very productive, growing community. Under the hood many of the major infrastructure got refactored or even rewritten/replaced; a lot of new code has been written. On the way a new community gathered. We have reached a point where only 1/3 of our code base looks similar to the code I once forked. We got a few side projects (edakrill, genxproj, cschem) started up. Our main project, pcb-rnd changed a lot over the past year. Time has come to move on, and leave gEDA. Well, not that pcb-rnd was ever really a part of gEDA in any practical way: - Other than the mailing list, we did not use any of the gEDA infrastructure - The gEDA community did not really welcome us; just check how many clicks it takes from geda main page to figure that pcb-rnd even exist, if you don't already know the name! We got more contribution and support from other communities. - Although I tried multiple times with various strategies, we couldn't really establish good cooperation with other gEDA projects (except for one case, Roland merging the back annotation patch). In fact, we found better cooperation with project/people outside of gEDA. - Compatibility-wise: we are as compatible with gEDA as with kicad or protel and lately even with eagle. By now the old pcb/fp file format is not special to us, just yet another non-native format. So why pcb-rnd leaves gEDA? The reason is simply the cost/benefit ratio. I am sorrt if this hurts some gEDA users and contributors, but being affiliated with gEDA is bad marketing almost everywhere outside the gEDA community. This became clear as we built a lot of contacts with non-gEDA users and contributors and projects. (I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, figuring why, and I have a theory. If anyone is interested, I am willing to share, but I don't want to start a flamewar, and it's not my turn to try to change gEDA.) In return, I never felt pcb-rnd got much from the gEDA project. The usual misconception is that we got a lot of users because we advertised pcb-rnd on this list. In reality, what brought majority if our current users and contributors is a totally different strategy I started to use in 2016 - and it brought people from random places, only partly from gEDA. Another important aspect is that the number of users that can be reached through this mailing list is very very limited. The bigger number of gEDA users out there who may benefit from switching to pcb-rnd are practically unaccessible to us. Which is fine, long term I expect only minority of our target audience consists of ex-PCB-users. I never intended to replace PCB or get tons of PCB users. No offense meant, PCB for the win, hail for all the new releases. But comparing the 1 year progress of PCB and pcb-rnd, I think the loser of this setup is the user who couldn't learn about pcb-rnd because they didn't subscribe to geda-user and thought the only pcb editor gEDA offered was PCB. I also think pcb-rnd was a great opportunity for gEDA to benefit from the energy we have and switch gEDA to a higher gear - but for various reasons the opportunity was missed. What's next? What does leaving gEDA mean in practice: we removed all references to gEDA from the current version of our material, except for the history section. We do not pretend we did not start from gEDA, we just don't regard ourselves to be affiliated with gEDA in any way from now. In a sense, with this move we only make the relationship symmetric (we still have more references to gEDA this way than gEDA has to us, tho). With pcb-rnd we are going to walk our own way, more than ever. Good bye gEDA, and good luck competing kicad and others for new users! Future of pcb-rnd: I managed to find a way to further increas my time spent on pcb-rnd and side projects next year. Meanwhile our community is growing too, more people spending more time on developing pcb-rnd. With all our new tools and projects, we are building a new (yet to be named), independent GPL'd EDA suite: pcb-rnd, cschem, edakrill and genxproj are the framework. It will take years to accomplish this, but this is definitely the right path for us. One may regard this effort as gEDA 2.0 as we reproduce a lot of ideas/values that once made gEDA successful - but we also deviate in many values and choices, so it's better to take it as a new suite. Is the departure/split/fork inevitable? Almost certainly. In the past two years I believed pcb-rnd proved that my strategy works well, while gEDA demonstrated how the old strategy works. I can imagine pcb-rnd stays in gEDA and we all start to work together on getting gEDA back on track and I even regroup part of my pcb-rnd time to invest it in gEDA. But the only construction I could accept for this would be totally unacceptable for everyone else in the gEDA project. I guess we should just accept that we want to run our project in totally different ways and split. How gEDA will relate to us in the future is up to gEDA. I'll write part 2 about this in another mail. Regards, Igor2