I'm thinking of finally taking the plunge with PCB design, and looking for design tools. Just curious why you use gEDA?

I was thinking of Eagle, which seems to be a de facto standard in the hobby area, and there are third party parts libraries (Sparkfun and Adafruit, for example). Some people like kicad. You're the only major site that I know of that uses gEDA, so I wanted to hear your thoughts on that package, and why you selected it.

Thanks very much!
jeff

There was some discussion recently about it in the comments section of a story posted back in '07:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/pcbtools

or

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/pcbtools#comments

For our open source hardware projects, we think that it's important that our "source" is released freely to the extent possible, so that as many people as possible can use it without cost. That means, cross platform, and free or low cost.

* Eagle is popular software among hobbyists, but it's actually quite expensive. I don't think that someone should have to pay $1000 just to make a little mod and generate gerbers from our Peggy designs, for example.

* KiCad is free but only works on linux and windows.

* gEDA is free and works on all major platforms. Also, it's pretty damn good, actually.