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[Joerg Reisenweber]

Am So  5. April 2009 schrieb Lothar Behrens:
> Hi,
> 
> I am mostly reading and sometime writing here. If it was useful or  
> useless - I don't know. But anyway.
> Isn't it possible to also develop hardware collaboratively?
[...]
Hi Lothar,
nope this won't fly. It's basically the sw pov approach to hw development 
Steve mentioned in one of his current posts.
Developing hw is more than creating a good looking schematics in Eagle, and 
tasks like layout are partially done by autorouter and the other half is a 
*close* *interactive* process between the layout gal, the EE guys, the RF 
guys, the ME dept, sourcing dept etc etc.
IIRC OM had some really nasty experience when outsourcing some layout task. 
Just because the layout didn't understand exactly what EE had in mind when 
creating the schem, and EE didn't closely check the work of layouters.

for your Q about project files instead of pdf: OM is making money by selling 
hw, so there's not much sense in publishing data that doesn't help EE guys in 
community to understand the hw but instead is only needed for production 
purposes. In the end you can't do anything on a single-device basis with 
layout or schem proj data you couldn't do without it. Or are you the guy 
who's etching 8-layer at home and soldering uBGA by hand? ;-) You can't patch 
a ready-done 8layer PCB, no matter what your document files are (sw POV on 
hw!). And no company is going to invest in producing some dozen proto PCB 
done by "anonymous" community guys, without checking each and every trace and 
footprint again what in the end for sure is more work than doing it inhouse 
from scratch.
Other companies tend to keep schematics closed to protect their IP, so we at 
OM at least don't want to give asian cloners a kickstart without adding *any* 
benefit for our customers.

best regards
jOERG
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