FreeCAD
open-cad-foundation
| FreeCAD | open-cad-foundation | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |
| 100 | 23 | |
| - | - | |
| 0.0 | 6.0 | |
| 7 days ago | 6 months ago | |
| C++ | ||
| GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | - |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
FreeCAD
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FreeCAD Project Association 2023 Annual report and 2024 plans
Ondsel managed to make FreeCAD intuitive, it's actually quite usable already! I never could get things done in FreeCAD. Some would say it's a skill issue, and they'd be right. And yet Ondsel "just works" for me.
One downside is that Ondsel has recently put the download behind a sign up for their SaaS offerings. Even though there's a free tier, requiring a sign up is very anti-user and not really indicative of the open-source CAD saviour we all want...
For now they still have releases on github, though:
https://github.com/Ondsel-Development/FreeCAD/releases
But it really should be available on their official website and not hidden behind a dark pattern (IMHO).
open-cad-foundation
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FreeCAD Project Association 2023 Annual report and 2024 plans
Great to see FreeCAD growing!
A few months ago after a tweet about open source CAD got way more traction than I would have expected, I started a discussion board using github's discussion feature to document some analysis of the open source CAD landscape and how best to achieve a professional-ready open source CAD system.
I did a fair amount of digging in to all the possible options, and ultimately came to the conclusion that FreeCAD and the fork by Ondsel are our best hope of good open source CAD for professional users.
If you are curious, take a look at the discussions and reasoning, captured here on that discussion board:
https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussio...
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PartCAD the first package manager for CAD models
If anyone is curious I started a discussion forum [1] with the goal of researching possible paths to good quality open source CAD, after an off-hand tweet of mine about open source CAD got significant traction on twitter.
Based on what I know so far, it seems that FreeCAD might be finally getting the investment it needs to mature as a real option. There is an organization called Ondsel which is taking on a lot of UI and assembly bench improvements, and I have heard that their preview versions are worth checking out. [2]
Notably, the big question about open source CAD relates to the geometry kernel used. They take decades to produce, and only OpenCASCADE is even remotely mature enough. OpenCASCADE is also somewhat tricky to work with, but it seems to be our only choice. Even if we had millions of dollars of investment in open source CAD it seems unlikely we could do better than OpenCASCADE based on what I have learned.
So my next step when I get some time is to explore how the Ondsel branch of FreeCAD is going and see if I can convince myself this is the path we should all be supporting. I do see no other paths currently, so my hope is that we see FreeCAD mature enough that it becomes usable by professional mechanical engineers.
[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussio...
[2] https://ondsel.com/download/
What are some alternatives?
atomCAD