An UNIX approach would be to provide a set of tools each doing a small part of the job, being able to communicate to each other, and let the user @@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ the hardest part of this is accepting alternatives. Different projects choose different approaches, different design, different programming language, different data models. This is not a bad thing, -this is a good thing. This is what gives us alternatives. Unfortunately +this is a good thing. This is what gives us alternatives. Unfortunately this means code duplication, effort duplication, waste of human resources. But it's still much much cheaper than the loss we'd induce by forcing everyone to work on and use the One True Solution! That said, I don't @@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ It only means we could just do the cheap part today and worry about these tomorrow instead of getting blocked wondering how to solve these.
-Centralization: it's not required to have a central organization or
+Centralization: it's not required to have a central organization or
effort to coordinate such an ecosystem in any way. It may be useful to
have such coordination in smaller clusters of the ecosystem, tho, but I
don't think we should worry too much about this at all. If the tools and
@@ -140,3 +140,15 @@
interfere with local installations or distro installation.
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+ 1: Some gEDA/PCB users are excited about the new features
+in pcb-rnd. They'd switch. When I ask what keeps them back, I often get
+this answer: "I'll finish my current design in gEDA/PCB but I will try
+pcb-rnd with my next design". Even if pcb-rnd is 100% compatible with gEDA/PCB
+for reading .pcb files. I call it the invisible lock-in: we do not
+have any technical measures that would keep users from switching between
+PCB and pcb-rnd forth and back but they act as if there was. Maybe they
+just got used to this lock-in idea too much with other CADs.