The blog entry on open source seems to have generated more comments than anything else. Maybe it’s because all the EDA users want software to be free, and all the EDA producers are worried that it might head in that direction. Everyone has an opinion.
In a seemingly off-topic thought, let me recommend Econtalk which is a weekly interview by Russ Roberts (a prof at GMU and Stanford) with someone knowledgeable on some aspect of economics interpreted in a wide sense. Last week it was Keynesian economics and the week before it was building schools in Africa. I typically burn it to CD each week and listen while commuting.
This week these two disconnected items tie together since Russ’s guest is Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talking about open source and the nature of the open source process. Recommended.
One thing about open source that I think people misunderstood is that I was not predicting that there would or should be open source EDA tools, or that the market was not big enough. I think open source is successful when the programmer and the user are the same person so there is no need to try and reduce the requirements to a specification. Or where the project is an open source copy such as creating open source Flash, or even Linux (open source Unix), so that the original serves as the specification. I’ve even seen people claim that if you need a specification the project is already off the rails. It is really hard to write good software for an application that you don’t understand well yourself, where you are not going to be your own user. EDA software is largely like that. Designers are not (good) programmers and programmers know scarily little about chip design
There seems to be a similar dynamic about many websites: Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, mySpace and many others were created to serve a need that the founders felt they needed filled for themselves, and then were smart enough to seize the moment. On the other hand I think there is lots of opportunity on the net for sites serving older people. The people who found web companies are young and as a result older people are underserved. But old people are on the web, they have money, they have time and they are a fast growing demographic. What’s not to like? Like in the open source case, the people who create such companies and write the code are unlikely themselves to be in their 60s and 70s so creating something successful is much harder.