Re: Exportability of EDA industry from North America?

From: Rick Thompson (nospam_at_nospam.com)
Date: 01/19/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:53:23 +0000

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:50:35 GMT, Rich Grise <richgrise@example.net>
wrote:

>On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 09:30:50 +0000, Rick Thompson wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:46:53 -0500, Chuck Harris
>> <cf-NO-SPAM-harris@erols.com> wrote:
>> I bought my current Win2K 4 years ago, and I can
>> still download updates and security fixes for free. What exactly makes
>> RedHat think that they can charge year-on-year for that?
>
>They think they can, because they can. It's pretty much that simple.
>People pay them. People want Aunt-Tillie-Ready stuff, with the security
>of a Linux kernel, so they pay the Redmond^H^H^H^HHat people to do all of
>their configuration for them.

I've got no problem with configuration. I've got RH7.2 on one machine
and FC2 on another, with various different combinations of libc, gcc,
gdb, gtk, and all the rest of it, without problems. My issue is with
all the half-arsed beta front-end stuff that the hackers put out with
every distro and every release of that distro. Just one example: the
help system on my RH7.2 never worked, despite a clean install, because
of some Nautilus configuration problem that I couldn't find. How can
you *possibly* ship a leading distribution with this level of
incompetence? Bill Gates must be laughing all the way to the bank.

The great thing about the new RedHat is that they might, finally,
bring a level of professionalism that could consign all this nonsense
to history. But, of course, without an annual subscription. Bill Gates
didn't need it, after all.

>As far as "The EDA vendors only support RedHat", that could be because
>Redmond^H^H^H^HHat is the only distro that _needs_ vendor support.

Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor aren't stupid; they turn over nearly $3B
between them. I don't know why they supported it historically, but
RH7.2 was widely accepted. If that's good enough for them, then that's
all the encouragement I need. Linux badly needs some standardisation;
having so many distributions may be great for hackers, but it could
kill Linux for serious work.

BTW, I used Debian for a year and wasn't impressed.

Rick