5 ms·

Oh, that wasn't a personal complaint - I'm not in the field, and don't know enough about it to roll my own. I'm more curious how this is sustainable as a busine

by azernik 13y ago

Oh, that wasn't a personal complaint - I'm not in the field, and don't know enough about it to roll my own. I'm more curious how this is sustainable as a business model, and how buyers of this software react to this kind of restriction.

jacquesm 13y ago
That's because buyers do not generally see it as a restriction. The world you're referring to is not 'virtual', it is solidly grounded in capital goods for production. At the costs of a typical spin the use of the software is a very very small fraction, and that fraction is gladly paid because it avoids unnecessary spins (think of a spin as an 'edit-compile-test' cycle, only with a price tag of a few hundred K on the low end to a few million and up on the high end). The software you're talking about has 1000's of manyears and sometimes 10's of thousands or even higher numbers of manyears involved in writing, testing, debugging. The present day value of that investment is so large that it serves as a defensible moat against any upstart company entering the market with a competing product, and if they do they will likely end up pricing it the same or higher (once they have the bugs worked out...). Open source works well for fields where there are 100's of thousands of potential users for something that you can build in a reasonable amount of time and which does not require extensive domain knowledge spread out over lots of individuals. For software like this, specialized, very expensive to develop and with a limited audience licenses are still the way it is done and as far as I can see it's the only model that makes sense. The alternative, bespoke software would be far more expensive still, the licenses are at least affordable to those who need them.
- pjc50 13y ago
  I agree; market entry to EDA, even for a "utility" that you add to the build chain to improve your results, is extremely hard.
- nkurz 13y ago
  I appreciate your perspective, but I have great trouble getting past the feeling that this system is woefully societally inefficient. It seems so wasteful to have a handful of companies, each putting in tens of thousands of hours for products that do essentially the same thing, striving for lock-in and barrier to entry. Yes, this is better than requiring each hardware company develop their own. But maybe there are other solutions that still result in the tools being available, both to those who can currently afford it and to those who can't? A shorter copyright term seems like one step in that direction. Nationalize one of the firms and open source it, leading to both a lower priced alternative and greater price competition for the remaining? I guess it's a question of what the goal is. I'd put global accessibility to the developed technology up very high, and presume that dropping the cost and barriers to entry for both the hardware and software firms would help this.

by azernik 13y ago

jacquesm 13y ago

That's because buyers do not generally see it as a restriction. The world you're referring to is not 'virtual', it is solidly grounded in capital goods for production. At the costs of a typical spin the use of the software is a very very small fraction, and that fraction is gladly paid because it avoids unnecessary spins (think of a spin as an 'edit-compile-test' cycle, only with a price tag of a few hundred K on the low end to a few million and up on the high end). The software you're talking about has 1000's of manyears and sometimes 10's of thousands or even higher numbers of manyears involved in writing, testing, debugging. The present day value of that investment is so large that it serves as a defensible moat against any upstart company entering the market with a competing product, and if they do they will likely end up pricing it the same or higher (once they have the bugs worked out...). Open source works well for fields where there are 100's of thousands of potential users for something that you can build in a reasonable amount of time and which does not require extensive domain knowledge spread out over lots of individuals. For software like this, specialized, very expensive to develop and with a limited audience licenses are still the way it is done and as far as I can see it's the only model that makes sense. The alternative, bespoke software would be far more expensive still, the licenses are at least affordable to those who need them.

pjc50 13y ago
I agree; market entry to EDA, even for a "utility" that you add to the build chain to improve your results, is extremely hard.
nkurz 13y ago
I appreciate your perspective, but I have great trouble getting past the feeling that this system is woefully societally inefficient. It seems so wasteful to have a handful of companies, each putting in tens of thousands of hours for products that do essentially the same thing, striving for lock-in and barrier to entry. Yes, this is better than requiring each hardware company develop their own. But maybe there are other solutions that still result in the tools being available, both to those who can currently afford it and to those who can't? A shorter copyright term seems like one step in that direction. Nationalize one of the firms and open source it, leading to both a lower priced alternative and greater price competition for the remaining? I guess it's a question of what the goal is. I'd put global accessibility to the developed technology up very high, and presume that dropping the cost and barriers to entry for both the hardware and software firms would help this.