Re: What is your favourite PCB software?

On Apr 21, 3:46 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
rickman wrote:
The point is that open formats are better for many reasons.
I don't want to work with closes proprietary design files
anymore and I won't. For my next design I will not use Orcad
any more and I won't be using Eagle if their file formats
are closed.

Here are two such reasons from my personal experience.

Example #1
A major aerospace company has over thirty thousand documents
in WordPerfect for MS-DOS format -- remember when that was
THE standard? The document have all been part of bids on
military contracts, and edited versions have to look the
same when printed out on new printers that had not been
invented yet when WordPerfect Corp. went belly up. And,
of course, the new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system
chokes on the files, so a parallel set of text versions
needs to be maintained.

Example #2
A small company has a product line that has been in production
for many years and is still quite profitable. All the PWBs
were created with the 1992 version of AutoCAD for Apple Macintosh
Release 12. So when a change is made they hand-edit the Gerber.

So, what are you happy FreePCB users using for schematic capture?

I still have Orcad which I don't care for. Many of the "hobbyist"
users are using TinyCad. I took a quick look at it and I don't care
for it, but may be I just need to look harder. Some use a variety of
tools such as gEDA. There certainly does not seem to be a consensus,
but TinyCad is likely the single most popular.

I am just surprised at how useful the FreePCB program is and that it
is written by *one* person! No team, no business plan, no venture
capital. Just one guy who likes using and writing CAD software.
Doesn't that say something about how businesses write programs?!! All
of the source is available, so you can even make your own
customizations if you want.
.