D.J. Delorie to work on the gEDA open soirce CAD program PCB

[David L. Jones]

I second the motion.

Me too.

Even if DJ did beat me in the 2007 PIC Circuit Cellar contest! :->

Dave.

 

[Jasen Betts]

MS actually will give you quite good help... if you pony up for the
several-hundred-buck-per-incident support phone lines. :-( (And there's no
charge if the problem turns out to be due to a bug, supposedly.)

IOW: they don't charge you if the help desk can't fix it.

 

[Anton Erasmus]

Gee Jan, I don't see anything wrong with DJ getting paid to
write software. And we all stand to benefit.

What's wrong with that?

Thanks RH, and thanks DJ.

I concur.
Most people need to earn a living. In the long run it is much better
for everyone, if all programmers could write software while being
paid, AND have the software being open source.
How much good quality code has been lost because it is closed
source and have been abandoned for one reason or another ?
If the situation is such that commercial companies find it to there
benefit to pay for open source development, then in the long run
everyone benefits.

Regards
Anton Erasmus

 

[Nobody]

Because they are the ones distributing the binaries. Though I agree it
does not make much difference here - but in general how do we know if
the official sources contain all the modifications needed to make the
software build correctly? It is safest if the code is available, at
least in principle, from a single source (i.e. the same one that
supplied the binaries).

It also avoids the following situations:

A hobbyist writes some code, and publishes it on his personal website.
A large corporation then distributes binaries with their product, and
refers their users to the author's website for the source. The author's
website either goes down or gets shut down for drastically exceeding its
bandwidth quota.

A less common issue is that the site hosting the source may be less
accessible than the one hosting the binaries. E.g. the source may only be
available by CVS (which may be a problem if you're behind a firewall or
proxy which only allows web and email), or it may be on a shared community
site which emphasises free speech, and thus finds itself on the wrong side
of filtering proxies.

Hence the GPL's requirement that "equivalent" access means that the source
must be available from "the same place" as the binaries.

 

[Nobody]

Looks like they did not test on a lot of hardware platforms.

I'm sure they tested on "a lot" of platforms, but you can't test *all* of
them. Microsoft has an unfair advantage here: anyone who makes hardware
will test it for Windows. If they didn't, even Microsoft couldn't test
Windows against every piece of PC hardware.

It doesn't help when h/w vendors pull tricks like using the same product
code for a dozen substantially different versions of the hardware.
Of course, they'll adjust the supplied Windows drivers accordingly, but
Linux users are left having to read the part numbers on the chips to
figure out exactly which product they have.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

I'm surprised that so many manufacturers seem to do this. I've always
figured it's been marketing-driven -- the marketing guys see that the WRT54G
is selling like gangbusters, so they figure it's "risky" to release, e.g., the
WRT55G. Still, there could at least release a WRT54Gv2, which to most
consumers still says, "better than the first!" and doesn't risk the loss of
model recognition.

There are several 45G models.

They all operate the best with WRT loaded onto them.

Yep... http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/dd-wrt/about.html

 

[Nobody]

Chip vendors do the same thing. If volume gets high enough
they often switch to a new version of the silicon that is
less expensive to manufactur but still meets the same specs.

I gather that vendors have procedures so major customers get
notified and/or get a chance to test the new version without
getting surprised in case there is some obscure not-documented
feature that they are depending upon which is different in the
new version.

In the era of the 6502-based microcomputers (Acorn, Commodore), use of the
undocumented (i.e. undefined) opcodes was so common that some assemblers
included mnemonics for them. If you swap the CPU for a 65C02 (where the
undefined opcodes are all NOPs), a lot of software (esp. games) won't run.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

I was aware of most of those variations. my WRT54G appears to be
version 5 with Firmware Version: v1.00.1


My point was that they are turning it into a family of products, to
capitalize on the popularity of the original. I know different versions
of the original have been released.

The best ones to buy are the V2 jobs on ebay that have been upgraded to
the WRT firmware. Then, you have a pro-level router at consumer-level
prices.

The v2 has the fastest CPU and the most memory in it. It allows you to
put better antennas on it, and bump up the power of your WAN to pro
router power levels.

Or, you could just buy the right unit, and upgrade the firmware
yourself. The WRT stuff is the best out there.