Hi all,

No one company drives a standard. IPC has to answer to ANSI on its
process for creation, updating and approving standards.  It takes a lot
of work from both IPC employees and volunteers from member companies.
Rather than complaining about PCBLibraries "free" advertising we should
be asking why don't other CAD companies embrace standards by providing
export/import interfaces or "free" software to the industry.

History lesson for this Rant:
FACT: PCB Libraries offered to work with the 2-10 Data Transfer
Committee on a method to use the IPC-2581 (Data Transfer Standard) to
provide a tool which would use the Data Transfer standard.  At the time
this offer occurred the committee was looking for anyone to use the
standard to develop a tool.
Think back to a few years ago to the "DB++/GenCAM War" and the "Peace
Agreement" between Valor and IPC which resulted in 2 committees to work
on the best solution for a single standard.  As a member of the GenCAM
Committee, the Convergence Management Team, member of the 2-17 committee
and now the Chair of the 2-10 Committee, I have sat in many meetings
discussing the Chicken & Egg barrier to getting the IPC-2581 spec
accepted. (The Chicken & Egg barrier is EDA companies would not write an
interface unless their customers were asking for it and customers could
not migrate to the IPC-2581 standard without the EDA companies
interface.  PCBLibraries volunteered to implement the new standard which
would allow users to view the new IPC-7351 footprints.
Yes, PCBLibraries gets free advertising but nowhere in this discussion
have I seen evidence that another company was not allowed to provide a
free tool to the industry.  They did not force changes on the 1-13
Surface Mount land Patterns Subcommittee.  Both the IPC-2581 and
IPC-7351 were well on their way to completion when PCBLibraries offered
the 2-10 software.

Instead of complaining about the need to buy the CAD interfaces or
knocking the IPC for accepting an offer of free software, we should be
thanking both IPC and PCBLibraries for providing a means to visual the
changes on a footprint due to the 3 tiered approach free of charge. I am
grateful that I do not need to fill in a form in order to download this
software as I do with other free offers.

An additional 2 cents on this rant, time to go back to work,
------------------------------
Karen McConnell
Chair, IPC 2-10
Senior Member Engineering Staff - Electronics / PWB
Lockheed Martin - Engineering Process Improvement Center
http://www.epic.lmco.com/

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