[sdiy] PCB/Schematic software

[Karl Ekdahl]

David


>Sounds great.  As I said, if you're young, probably unmarried, almost
>certainly unburdened by children or homeownership, then working for next to
>nothing on stuff that you're passionate about is a great way of life (one
>that I envy, frankly).
>
>Having said that, I must say that I've been somewhat less than impressed
>with Open Office (which my wife has on her PC).  It has far less
>functionality than MS Office.  In fact, I can't think of a single
>"professional" person of my acquaintance who doesn't use MS Office.

I think you're not quite understanding this. This is not just something 
people do on "their spare time" but in fact there are several companies 
having open source products, the thing is just that they're earning 
their money other ways then selling the product (support for instance). 
This goes well and beyond the classic ideas of capitalism and uses 
community as an extended work force among other things. Also often the 
idea is that people make a great software together because their goal is
 not to earn their keep selling the software, but through what they do 
*with* the software. As far as i'm concerned, this is a very functional 
implementation of pseudo-socialist and communal ideas that has a bright 
future ahead of it, not only in software but i believe it can be 
extended into many different areas. 

The idea that Open Source software isn't "as good" as other software is 
BS (and something i hear from time to time from people who refuse to 
believe that Open Source is a good thing), this should be quite evident 
simply by looking at how many Linux servers are out there. While it 
might be true tho that for instance Open Office does not have as many 
features as MS Office (or that you can't find them because the interface
 is slightly different), i'm pretty sure it's got enough features for 
most of us - i most certainly don't need any more features.

sorry for being off-topic, this is close to heart

Karl