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Message
From: Alex Harford<alex@a...>
Date: Thu May 13 01:50:44 CEST 2004
Subject: [oc] One issue about free hardware
On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 02:55:03PM -0700, Erez Birenzwig wrote:
> Hi Richard,
>
> When was the last time you read all of GCC code ? Or Python ?
> Or Perl ? Or Apache ? I can keep going....
>
Well, RMS wrote gcc, so I would hope that he read it too! :)
> To conclude, I think that open source EDA tools is nice, but in reality most
> of the participant in this list, are either working for EDA companey,
> electronics engineers or students, for good EDA tools that can compete with
> commercial ones, you need a lot of know-how, and a good background. It's
> a lot harder to design and write then a new window manager or a new shell for
> windows. The problems are at a different scale, and most of the code is
> propriatry and not accessible. This makes the task very hard and you need very
> dedicated people to do that, espacially because the community is not as large.
>
I was still in diapers when the GNU project started but I'm assuming that's the
same argument that RMS ran into, ie 'Why develop a free Unix, it's going to be
hard and there are already commercial ones out there?'.
I wonder what a good term would be for the things that are currently described
as 'IP' in the hardware field. Ie a common phrase is something like 'the memory
controller is someone else's IP'. Maybe proprietary core vs free core?
--
Alex Harford
http://www.alexharford.com
alex-spam@a... Tel: (604) 738-5674
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