IMO: schematics are fine. You're unlikely to use the same CAD software they did anyway.
This feels a bit like complaining about some company publishing the source for their MSVC++ win32 app.
This feels a bit like complaining about some company publishing the source for their MSVC++ win32 app.
It doesn't matter if you use the same CAD tool or not, there are a variety of utilities for converting the design files. What matters is if you can reproduce and modify the design. That's simply not possible without the complete design files.
You don't release the artifacts of your compiled code and call it open source. You release all the source required to generate those artifacts. Anything short of that is not open and fundamentally mistakes what it means for something to be "open source."
A good schematics is all you need. (it must have components values). The rest (layout, analysis) you can do it yourself.
> It doesn't matter if you use the same CAD tool or not, there are a variety of utilities for converting the design files. What matters is if you can reproduce and modify the design. That's simply not possible without the complete design files.
Well, it's a bit different from SW. Schematics is some kind of source code and the layout is a kind of compiled code. Different layouters will produce different layouts.
And when you modify the design you have to redo the circuit analysis and , maybe, the layout .
> You don't release the artifacts of your compiled code and call it open source. You release all the source required to generate those artifacts. Anything short of that is not open and fundamentally mistakes what it means for something to be "open source."
You release only your program, not the whole OS. Somedy who wants to "reproduce your design" still needs a compiler and an OS to run it.( and depending on the conpiler it may obtain different results :) )
As an example, it's common to group all the bypass caps together in a schematic. This doesn't reflect the reality that those bypass caps need to be physically close to the power pins on specific components. The value is not sufficient to reflect their use.
It's no different from software engineering, the schematic is not the source code. It's a block diagram describing how the source works.
Why?
But either way, it is much easier to convert from one CAD format to another then to convert PDF to CAD.
Open Source is when you can compile the provided project given the right tools.
From a Schematic alone you can't send the board to production. You'll need the BOM and the Layout for that.
Also OS encourage patch and contribution, without the layout you can just re-design the entire board from scratch, not doing incremental improvements on the OS version.