Hello there, In any linux event, contributors from various distributions talk about their particular distribution. No one talk about opensource projects for electronic simulation. In fact it can be considered as a minority in the opensource world. It is sad but it is the truth. However I want to push (with your help) these projects forward in terms of marketing and distribution. For the moment, Fedora is the Leader in terms of distribution of opensource electronic CADs. (thanks to various fedora contributors) http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraElectronicLab If one is familiar with proprietary electronic CADs he/she will notice that: * open source CADs lacks many features * proprietary electronic CADs companies are changing various languages such as VHDL, verilog implementations and standards in order to protect their property. * 98% of proprietary electronic CADs built and shipped their products under RHEL. Their Installation manuals includes RHEL as well. In other words, RPM distros are well known for electronic simulations. * proprietary electronic CADs are installed on RHEL/fedora or its clones. * Proprietary electronic CADs are expensive and those using them having more that 20 computers running these CADs. Thus at least 20 computers running RPM based distributions. As for the open source projects for electronic simulations, their developers are neither geeks nor full time software developers but electronic engineers and university lecturers. There are very few developers. These days, projects such as gEDA and gnucap are active and paving their way to attract professional designers/engineers. If one will follow gEDA user mailing list, he/she will notice most of them are fedora users. As for their developers are some individuals scattered around the world. They can't not afford to prepare a booth for an event and talk about their product. Thus I'm asking everyone reading this mail, please take some time to think and tell me how can fedora help these projects knowing that more than 60% of their user base is fedora users. I'm proposing during any event that Fedora is present, we could let some individuals (upstream of these electronic simulators) stay at our booth and talk about their product. Possibly if fedora lacks contributors to give speech, we can allocate some time to them. Surely, we give fedora contributors the priority first and use fedora banners at our booth. In the past, in Germany(Chemnitz), we let Centos distribute their flyers at our booth and share good relationships with Centos. Perhaps we can do the same for the minority projects. If everyone agrees, we could propose something like: every fedora ambassador preparing an event decide whether he/she is willing to let upstream to join his/her team at the booth. Things that I think we shouldn't do is: * using fedora money to pay the hotel/voyage of those upstream * print flyers for upstream Many opensource advocates the use of opensource file formats or implementations. 90% of the time, they talk about microsoft office/OOO, mp3/ogg, png ... But everyone forgets the Hardware Description Languages such as VHDL,verilog and SystemC. If one google verilog, he/she will find various verilog from various vendors. Why ? I think you can figure it out by yourself. Fedora talks about innovation. Can Fedora Marketing/ambassadors afford a little innovation in terms of spreading the word about opensource ? I understand that it is a fair new subject for many of you here. I'll try to find time and prepare some notes and OOO presentations of these languages/softwares before F8's release. The developers of active opensource electronic cads (I know of) are * 2 from France: (piklab&alliance) * 1 from Germany/Swiss german, next to Gerold :) (gEDA) * 4 from USA (gEDA & gnucap) Lately, I've been promoting the next "Fedora Electronic Lab" livecd near these upstream. Most of the university lecturers (the developers) said that they will recommend it to their students. Thus we will not only expand the fedora user base, but will also have upstreams do the marketing for fedora. Meanwhile, I'll wait for your suggestions on how we can proceed,... Chitlesh -- http://clunixchit.blogspot.com -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
