( SNUG 00 Item 1 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 4/05/00 ]
First Impressions
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"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
- Oscar Wilde, British author, 1854 - 1900
One of the odd things of hearing a retrospective of 10 years of SNUG is not
what they're saying on stage as much as what they're *not* saying on stage.
When that Synopsys exec had us doing a show of hands of who in the crowd
was at the First SNUG meeting, my hand wasn't up. Why? Because, at that
time, I was still embroiled in a very ugly legal battle with Synopsys for
having created ESNUG. It was classic EDA company intimidation. I worked
at a company called Sequoia. Instead of telling me directly in our usual
weekly Sequoia/Synopsys phone call, the Synopsys Legal Department sent a
letter to the CEO of Sequoia Systems (my employer) claiming that I had
"violated the Synopsys/Sequoia NDA agreement" by running ESNUG. How I got
this news was by my CEO standing at my cubical entrance saying "I don't
know what you're doing, John, but you've gotta talk to our Legal Counsel
about this." It was ugly. Very ugly. It turned out Synopsys had no legal
standing because of this silly thing in the Bill of Rights called the First
Amendment, so Synopsys and I eventually resumed our weekly phone calls and
talking bugs. Then, when Sequoia went belly-up and I was laid off, I got a
message on my home answering machine from Synopsys gleefully saying: "John,
you don't work at Sequoia any more. Therefore you're not a legitimate
Synopsys user any more. So our guess is ESNUG is now shut down. Goodbye."
(If you want to view the history of this, watch how my phone number and ISP
changes from ESNUG 86 to ESNUG 89. Synopsys didn't know about non-work
ISPs at the time and was quite unhappy that ESNUG found a new home.) ESNUG
had officially become a guerrilla organization. And although, legally, I
couldn't get copies of Synopsys manuals, users would mail them to me at
home anonymously! I burst out laughing when Richard Goering of EE Times
caught wind of ESNUG and wrote about it. Over night Synopsys suddenly
became more co-operative. The weekly bug phone calls resumed.
On the company front, Synopsys, Inc. was having one hell of a time getting
any users to join the SNUG Board of Directors because it was known it would
be just a "Yes" group completely under Synopsys control.
Eventually, Synopsys management calmed down. They realized I wasn't the
Anti-Christ out to bring Armageddon unto Synopsys, and that maybe, just
maybe, I was just an engineer who wanted to swap bugs, tips, workarounds,
and *honest* user thoughts on EDA tools. So, by the time I made it to the
2nd Annual SNUG Meeting, Synopsys had accepted the idea of SNUG becoming
truly user-driven like ESNUG. Thereafter all Synopsys sales & marketing
were banned from SNUG. CAEs and R&D were very welcome. User papers were
expected to be completely truthful, warts and all discussions. And SNUG
started having customers eager to join the SNUG Board of Directors.
Since that time, I've had more ups and downs with Synopsys, but generally
I've been in this weird role of 1.) keeping Synopsys (and many other EDA
companies) "honest", 2.) making sure the SNUG gathering stays user-driven
(with the SNUG Tech Chair, Don Mills, doing 99.9% of this work), and 3.)
encouraging EDA customers to tell it as it really is every week in ESNUG,
warts and all.
It's funny how these stories don't get told at 10-year retrospectives...
"We have 2000 CPUs on our compute farm running all of SUN's EDA
tools 24 hours a day. About 80 percent of those CPU cycles are
running VCS."
- Pramod Rustagi of Sun Microsystems
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