The motivation is generally that Electronic Design Automation software sucks .. for black hole levels of suck.
EDA software exists in a weird reality of a small number of people who use it and an even smaller number of people who understand, really, how to program it while being excessively valuable to a very captive market base.
A small number of users combined with an even smaller programmer base results in a large number of features per user. Consequently, if you aren't using the absolute, bog-standard central features, you are going to hit bugs. And, if your feature is even slightly esoteric, you may be 1 of 2 users of that feature worldwide.
Add in to this mix that the programmers of EDA software often don't actually know how to use that use that software, and you have an absolute nightmare of misfeatures combined with bad usability with a whole bunch of bugginess on top.
The only way around this is open-source. Sure, your open source version is worse. However, a sufficiently motivated user can pull the code and fix a bug. A sufficiently motivated user can pull the code and add a missing feature. Open source can accumulate the effort of the very small number of individuals who can both code software and design hardware over a very large block of time without interference from market pressures.
Finally, EDA tools have software lifetimes of decades. We are still using SPICE decks that trace to late 70s FORTRAN.
An example of all of this coming together is software I wrote probably 15 years ago. I once wrote an HSPICE reader in Python. No big deal you say? Well, it could read 15 years of HSPICE files--some of which had been transferred from strange things like fixed-record file machines. It was WAY better than anything any HSPICE vendor ever coughed up. I released it open source.
And about 10 years ago, somebody found it, and extended it to even MORE HSPICE formats. It is now even better than any commercial HSPICE reader will likely ever be. However, had I made the code closed source, the person who found it would have created his own code that only dealt with a couple of formats that he was interested in.
So, the fact that I made that code open source means that if I ever need to come back to it, it is now fundamentally better than anything I could have written and is available to me regardless of what company I'm working for.
So, not only does my itch get scratched, it gets scratched better than I could possibly have ever done myself.
EDA software exists in a weird reality of a small number of people who use it and an even smaller number of people who understand, really, how to program it while being excessively valuable to a very captive market base.
A small number of users combined with an even smaller programmer base results in a large number of features per user. Consequently, if you aren't using the absolute, bog-standard central features, you are going to hit bugs. And, if your feature is even slightly esoteric, you may be 1 of 2 users of that feature worldwide.
Add in to this mix that the programmers of EDA software often don't actually know how to use that use that software, and you have an absolute nightmare of misfeatures combined with bad usability with a whole bunch of bugginess on top.
The only way around this is open-source. Sure, your open source version is worse. However, a sufficiently motivated user can pull the code and fix a bug. A sufficiently motivated user can pull the code and add a missing feature. Open source can accumulate the effort of the very small number of individuals who can both code software and design hardware over a very large block of time without interference from market pressures.
Finally, EDA tools have software lifetimes of decades. We are still using SPICE decks that trace to late 70s FORTRAN.
An example of all of this coming together is software I wrote probably 15 years ago. I once wrote an HSPICE reader in Python. No big deal you say? Well, it could read 15 years of HSPICE files--some of which had been transferred from strange things like fixed-record file machines. It was WAY better than anything any HSPICE vendor ever coughed up. I released it open source.
And about 10 years ago, somebody found it, and extended it to even MORE HSPICE formats. It is now even better than any commercial HSPICE reader will likely ever be. However, had I made the code closed source, the person who found it would have created his own code that only dealt with a couple of formats that he was interested in.
So, the fact that I made that code open source means that if I ever need to come back to it, it is now fundamentally better than anything I could have written and is available to me regardless of what company I'm working for.
So, not only does my itch get scratched, it gets scratched better than I could possibly have ever done myself.