Open Source in 2020

By Cadence

January 9, 2020

I recently wrote a couple of posts about open-source EDA tools, OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII and 2nd WOSET Workshop on Open-Source EDA. I have also written about open-source in general, as an approach to development and an approach to business in a post from over four years ago that I think stands up well: The Paradox of Open Source. The reason I called it a paradox is that it seems to be one of the most effective ways to develop software but it doesn't really have a business model that works.

All over the internet are pieces complaining that open source is broken. A particularly good one is The Cathedral and the Bizarre—a critique of twenty years of open source. The title is a play on The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a book by Eric S. Raymond (also known as "esr") who introduced the term "open source" as a replacement for "free software", which always needed to be qualified as "free as in speech, not as in beer" but was the term introduced by the pioneer in the space, Richard Stallman ("rms"). I discussed the book in my earlier post linked to above.

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