Fedora Project, give me 20 Million Euros or Free EDA software

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 01/31/2009 10:21 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>
> Now, thinking about it: Are there any other uses for OVM aside from
> running it in a non free simulator? Would it somehow be useful for
> people to learn from even though they cannot run it? Or is there any
> other reasons it would be useful for people who don't have access to
> the non free simulator?
>   
Let's put it the other way around: how many people WITHOUT access to a 
commercial simulator would be interested in this package ? What if you 
are in my case, where you have a Fedora server which shares the content 
and dozens of users using Centos + non-free EDA tools ?
As of  "would possibly install this package, get confused, be unable to 
run it" it's easy to solve with a single one liner in %Description: "For 
the moment you will need <add proper application name here> to use it".

This package is interesting for a subset of the people interested in 
EDA. And I am confident that most if not all of those people have access 
to the commercial tools, either via academic licenses or plain 
enterprise licenses. It's a domain where simply put, there exists NO 
free equivalent for the commercial tools. Sad but true. Some bits have 
been touched but there is a very long way to go to reach even 20% of 
what the commercial tools do. And I can tell that as a person who 
has/used to have access to beta releases of Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor 
Graphics tools and has tried to convince fellow colleagues to use free 
tools instead of the commercial ones. As I have already told, the only 
success was using gtkwave IF the licenses for commercial products were 
already occupied by other engineers [*].

[*] Licenses are expensive enough so we cannot afford purchasing the 
number which would allow anyone to run anything anytime. So tasks have 
to be queued or other tools must be used instead when you do not want to 
wait a couple of hours for someone else's simulation to end.

        Manuel