With all the talk about American freedoms and liberty, it feels kind of odd being scolded for letting someone have their say. It all started in ESNUG, the newsletter I moderate.

An anonymous engineer had asked in ESNUG 375: "Does anyone out in ESNUGland have experience using Sun's Grid Engine software for managing EDA compute jobs and licenses? I used Platform's LSF at a previous employer and liked it, but my penny-pinching current employer likes the cost of Gridware: It's free."

Of course, the Platform people wanted to run a reply in the following week's ESNUG-until I stopped them. I don't allow sales pitches in ESNUG. I only let EDA "users" state "opinions" about tools in ESNUG. Users actually have to use the stuff to make chips. Marketers are just trying to sell you something. That's why I limit marketing letters to technical content or, to be fair, to "defend" their product if it's been "attacked" in ESNUG.

You'd laugh at how much sales drivel I have to edit out of marketing letters. I've had two-page letters boil down to two short sentences of technical content. "If your stuff is so great, have your customers write me directly saying so," I tell them. A good 90 percent of the time, I never hear anything more about their product again.

The problem came when I ran a reply from Kathy Rose of Sun in ESNUG 377. "You said 'No vendor replies allowed' when I wrote you to ask if Platform could respond to this item, yet you printed Sun's response," wrote Fred Hinchliffe of Platform. I pointed out that Kathy's three paragraphs were technical, and I reminded Fred that back in 1999, ESNUG 312 was a reprint of Platform's 12-page white paper on how to use LSF.

A week later I got three more e-mails from three different Platform people trying to set up a sales call with me. I returned Alex Lynch's call. He's Platform's head of business development. When we were done, Alex said he'd e-mail me a new paper detailing the technical differences between Gridware and LSF.

An hour later, Alex e-mailed me: "I found the document that outlines the differences between Gridware and LSF, but it's clearly marked 'Platform confidential,' so I couldn't send it to you." He had given me the runaround.

I can understand where Platform's coming from: It's trying to protect a $46 million business. Getting word out about Sun's free Gridware tool doesn't help. But Gridware's weakness is that it runs only on Solaris and Linux machines.

I can't wait to see what Platform tries once I mention that PBS by Veridian is also free. And PBS ((www.openpbs.org)) supports Sun, HP, IBM, Linux, SGI and even Cray supercomputers.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (esnug), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com or (508) 429-4357.