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

[Kevin Kofler]

Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
> 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 ?

Then why can't you just install the data from the tarball? What does Fedora
have to gain by offering it to you?

> 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".

That would be advertising the proprietary application.

> 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 [*].

Making it easier to use the proprietary tools is not the way to change that,
quite the opposite.

        Kevin Kofler