Xuropa offers FEL free exhibition space

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

Hello everyone,

First, I would like to wish you all Happy New Year 2009 with my best wishes.

Happy reading as well :)

== Abstract ==

Xuropa, a new company offering online virtual trade shows for the EDA
community, will be offering Fedora an "Online Lab" space for FEL. This
"Online Lab" package ( the most expensive package ) will be free for
Fedora and Xuropa will offer a paypal addon where people can donate to
Fedora.

Asking Fedora Board's approval to procede.


== About Xuropa ==

Xuropa is a new company focussing on building an online EDA community
around commercial and opensource EDA tools. With its platform, the
community can evaluate different tools, give presentations about one's
EDA software and identify the most appropriate software for his/her
design methodology.

http://xuropa.com
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2008/12/professional-marketing-strategy-for-eda.html


== About the Online Lab ==

This youtube video describes the "Online Lab" package and how a
subscribed user can acess FEL on Xuropa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZnAPI-nw&feature=related

Among the 4 packages (Online Kiosk,Online Booth,Online Suite and
Online Lab), Online Lab is the most expensive in accordance to:
http://www.xuropa.com/zone_restricted.php?zone_id=51

This package includes :
# Secure invite-only access to your products
# Remote product beta-testing
# Remote product training
# Remote product evaluations

The above video demonstrate what "remote" here means and how training
and beta testing can be carried out.

There will be no FEL download from Xuropa's website.


== Marketing ==

With our FEL LiveDVD, we
 - bring electronic engineers/students closer to opensource community
 - do marketing for our upstream projects such as gEDA/gaf,
opencircuitdesign,pharosc, perl-verilog*,..
 - ....

Now with this Online Lab we can bring FEL to the "next level" and give
upstream more chances to post their papers and do presentations via
FEL.

Xuropa's platform simulate an online conference hall.

In other words like it is like an event /forum, but online. Every
exhibitor has its booth(with a fee)  and presentation, but online to
help networking between ASIC engineers.

Though, with this exhibition strategy, I am obeying all Fedora ground
rules, I'm requesting again the usage of Fedora trademark to market
fedora and its packages. Thereby, I also like to precise there will
only be packages approved and built on our dear koji.

As you know, my intention about FEL is NOT about packaging electronics
tools for fedora, but to centralize(in fedora) _most_ electronic tools
to create design flows for micro-nano electronics and help opensource
developers to improve and distribute their tools with respect to
electronic industry trends. Thereby this means encourage upstreams to
communicate with other upstreams and help them market their software
for the real world.

In the electronics world, opensource EDA tools we have are far from
the professional environment where huge companies spend billions of
dollars in research and development. Hence with Xuropa, FEL enters the
big world of electronics where those multi-billions EDA vendors are,
to give our upstream projects room to market themselves through FEL.


== Donation feature ==

Xuropa's cofounder proposes a "donation" paypal feature for which they
will take a percentage of it. I'm ok with it. My question is, is
Fedora Board you ok with it ?

They would then collect funds and wire to "us" 85% of the proceeds
after expenses (paypal's and hardware and license costs).  This may
not be very much to start, but it will build over time. However, if we
are lucky, I guess we will get $100.

I nominate MaxSpevack to be in charge of all money transaction, since
he manages Fedora's budget already. IF we do happen to get lucky,
maybe it would be nice to use "Fedora Scholarship" to get more
contributors to FEL :)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scholarship


== How Fedora benefit from this ==

The Online Lab as the above youtube video demonstrates, subscribers
can access a Fedora session and use the FEL applications, rate, give
feedbacks and get familiar to FEL without download and installation.

It is a chance to show the quality-class distribution Fedora is and
what a Fedora user can achieve with FEL.

Companies willing to opensource their inhouse tools/scripts will more
likely use Fedora as a means to bring new features to the opensource
EDA tools on Fedora.

- Xuropa will provide FEL for others to use on their servers. (if
people like it, they will download it and promote/rate it)
- Many Field Application Engineers will hear Fedora for the first time.
- opensource EDA tools will be on the same rank as commercial tools in
terms of people mindset about "it's free it's not that good"
- more eda bloggers will blog about industry class opensource tools
such as perl-Verilog*, gtkwave, tkdiff
- We will have more concrete real life suggestions for improvements
from big names. We FEL contributors will learn from their experience
and leadership skills
- (I hope) FEL developers will grant access to some confidential
publications for free :) I hope
- all this depends on how we(FEL) can help to shape the opensource EDA
community to work together.
- .....................
- and what I wish the most, help big EDA vendors license their
opensource tools in a free distribuable way and use FEL as a means to
do so.
- more linux support from the chip vendors (if you look at the
websites of maxim-ic or linear technology,.. ) they provide free tools
to use with their chips. Chip samples anyone can order for free. But it is
sad that their tools can't be run under linux.

Lots of tiny things like that FEL will benefit from and make others
benefit from it.

I know it is a long shot, but we all know there is a need to satisfy
and I believe we can do step by step. We will hit walls for sure, but
we will also have bright days ahead of us.

CAD engineers who send time evaluating beta versions of vendors tools
on RedHat/CentOS will follow what the next RHEL will provide.


== How Upstream projects benefit from this ==

- More chances that in-house tools or scripts will be opensourced by companies.
- More chances upstream tools will have contributors who are willing
to shape opensource tools for real life usage
- More chances for free marketing or maybe sponsoring
- A means to make presentations to the masses via our presence on Xuropa.
.....

(more during fosdem)

I hope Fedora Board will see this as an opportunity to help both our
upstream projects and our new Fedora users.



Kind regards,
Chitlesh Goorah