[Noisebridge-discuss] More fun designing printed circuits tonight at the EagleCAD workshop

[Felipe Sanches]

hello, Noisebridge friends,

It really annoys me to observe this trend in adoption of EagleCAD. Even the
hackers working on Open Hardware (as I could confirm during the Open
Hardware Summit earlier this year in New York) are using proprietary sw
tools to create their PCBs.

As a free software activist, I am concerned about the issue and I would like
to better understand it. I'd like to understand what are the specific
features that the free sw EDA tools lack nowadays so that I can eventually
sit down and code.

But sometimes I feel that perhaps there might not be really a clear and
concious reasoning for users adopting Eagle. I mean... perhaps this is just
a cultural thing: people using Eagle just because other people are doing so
(and sharing eagle files, organizing workshops about it, etc, etc, etc.)

Yesterday I sent a short message about it in response to somebody releasing
eagle cad files for one of the OpenDoor Hackaton projects. Somebody else
judged that my message was not adequate and that I should do something
instead of criticizing other people's work. ("If you think you can do
better, then please do!") I think that I did not make myself clear by
sending just a short, quick message. So that's why I'm sending this longer
explanation of my intentions. It is to make clear that my intentions are not
to criticise the work of a specific hacker, but instead to criticise this
general culture of adopting proprietary tools in hackerspaces (and/or in
open hardware projetcs). And also would like to make it clear that my
intentions are indeed to actively "do something better" myself by trying to
organize a task force for mapping the current issues in free sw EDA tools
and then recruiting a team of hackers to put our hands in actual coding.

I have done something similar for the issue of proprietary
architechture&engineering CAD tools (such as AutoCAD) and the result has
been the creation of the GNU LibreDWG project (
http://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/ ). I hope that the experience I got
from working on this kind of approach towards software freedom could be
useful in the case of massive adoption of EagleCAD too.

Happy Hacking,
Felipe "Juca" Sanches
Garoa Hacker Clube, São Paulo - Brazil

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Jonathan Foote <jtfoote at ieee.org> wrote:

> Last week we went over the basics of EagleCAD, tonight we will see how
> far we can get designing a simple board.
> 7:00 in the couch area, see you there.
>
> If you missed last week. no worries, you can catch up pretty quickly:
> bring a laptop with EagleCAD installed
> (details here:  https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/EagleCAD_workshop) or
> just watch how it works on the big screen.
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
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