Within the world of CAD there are the well-known and more niche big commercial players and there are projects like FreeCAD that seek to bring a OSS solution to the CAD world. As with other OSS projects like the GIMP, these OSS takes on commercial software do not always follow established user interactions (UX), which is where Ondsel sought to bridge the gap by giving commercial CAD users a more accessible FreeCAD experience. This effort is now however at an end, with a blog post by Ondsel core team member [Brad Collette] providing the details.
The idea of commercializing OSS is by no means novel, as this is what Red Hat and many others have done for decades now. In our article on FOSS development bounties we touched upon the different funding models for FOSS projects, with the Linux kernel enjoying strong commercial support. The trick is of course to attract such commercial support and associated funding, which is where the development on the UI/UX and feature set of the core FreeCAD code base was key. Unfortunately the business case was not strong enough to attract such commercial partners and Ondsel has been shutdown.
As also discussed on the FreeCAD forum, the Ondsel codebase will likely be at least partially merged into the FreeCAD code, ending for now the prospect of FreeCAD playing in the big leagues with the likes of AutoCAD.
Thanks to [Brian Harrington] for the tip.
Been using the 1.0 release of FreeCAD for a bit now. It seems significantly more functional and much closer to commercial offerings.
I am confident moving forward I likely will be happy just using freecad. It was “usable” before 1.0…but now it seems “competitive”. Still a lot of functions for me to explore.
Where is there a 1.0 release of FreeCAD? Did you mean Ondsel?
Never mind, I see there are prereleases on the FreeCAD downloads page. Only obvious if you’re looking for them.
FreeCAD’s UI/UX paradigm comes from CATIA, which was superseded by more modern and better models in the 90’s. CATIA is generally loathed among those who still have to use it because of industry inertia, because it’s obtuse and difficult, making it inefficient in use.
It also does some of the logical hierarchy of the model wrong or at least completely differently from everyone else (part vs. body vs. assembly), which together with the separate workbenches paradigm leads to confusion and the need to learn the program as a collection of “discrete recipes” where you don’t exactly understand what you’re doing but you have memorized exactly how to do it.
Those are, I believe, the major reasons why it is so difficult to learn. Learning one thing doesn’t give you the stepping stool to do something else, because the route by which you get there may be entirely different and you can easily run into dead ends if you attempt it without a tutorial, and you can’t really “understand” the program because it’s internally confused.
Adding on a prettier user interface doesn’t really fix it.
Could you post a link to the FreeCAD 1.0 download? I wold like to give it a try. The website still lists 0.21 as the latest version.
Check GitHub. The weekly builds are also very useable.
https://www.freecad.org/downloads.php
Just scroll down a bit. Just below the “regular” version, there are links to 1.0 RC2, weekly builds and other stuff.
For me, the realthunder fork is fully usable, but 1.0 is missing a few important things that save lots of time, like the ability to stack transforms, and pads/pockets with tolerance. I’m still looking forward to everything finally getting unified though, and they’re making great progress.
I use NX1980 for the dayjob, and Fusion for my own work in the past including five axis work for both, and people still laugh at me for wanting FreeCAD to succeed.
When all software is subscription based and the same perils of everything losing access if you stop paying to your own work, I just wanted there to be a free alternative for long-term specialist projects for strange people doing their own thing that doesn’t go under.
Last I used FreeCAD I think it was pre 1.0, with Realthunder’s fork and improvements, but it still had a long way to go. If I hit the lottery tomorrow I would dump millions into the development team just to put something out there for the world that helps people create truly complex modern work with no strings attached and keep it free. Too many tech billionaires do nothing actually useful for the tech community, why can’t someone who isn’t aligned with nazis or some other crazy ideology who has a lot of money just evangelize OSS CADCAM?
Couldn’t hope but stick your politics into an otherwise reasonable post could you? So if a KKK member spent 10 million dollars and created an excellent, free OSS CADCAM, you would never use it? They’re not getting any remuneration from its use, so why are their politics relevant to the fact that this act would obviously benefit the world?
Well, my take was that the rich nazi would be LESS likely to spend on the greater good.
And it would also be better if the biggest benefactor isn’t nefariously aligned, it gives a bad reputation otherwise.
I did not quite understand Ondsel. I’m no software expert, but my best guess is that FreeCAD is not ready yet for commercialization. There are too many things not clear or muddy. I’ve tried a few of the “weekly builds”, and after each update I have to move the toolbars again, which was too much of a nuisance, and for me also enough to not install the release candidates.
I have been using FreeCAD on a hobby level for 10 years or so, and at first it was a curious program, but not very useful. In those 10 years I’ve learned my way in some parts of FreeCAD, and I can make some nice drawings with it, but it’s still a struggle for me. A few years ago I tried working a bit with some of the assembly workbenches, but those were not stable enough yet. I’m also still struggling to conquer each new workbench. Duplicated functions, functions that do not work reliably in some combinations, and then wondering whether it’s a bug, or if I’m using the wrong functions. Sometimes it’s also not clear to me whether whole workbenches are “stable” or “experimental”. I think I use less then 10% of FreeCAD because I get confused by that other 90%.
But overall, FreeCAD is making a steady progress. A few years ago their attitude to request for how to donate money was “Uh, we don’t really know what to do with donations”, and in the last few years this attitude has changed and now there are several ways to donate.
I am a strong proponent for Open Source software. I’ve donated more to Open Source then I’ve paid for commercial software (Even Windoze licences included, Last time I paid for that was for Windows 98).
For what I read on forums of other people are attempting to use FreeCAD, it’s often a struggle, and it’s by far not as “polished” as the “big commercial names” on the market. FreeCAD has (most of?) the functionality, but it needs many more mouse clicks, and more complicated workflows. Attempting to commercialize from that start point would be very difficult.
To me FreeCAD still feels as a mishmash of separate blocks hacked together. I hope that chances once I’ve been using V1 for a while. But at the (still slow) pace I see FreeCAD evolving, I guess it would be another 5 or so years before FreeCAD starts to be competitive with “commercial software”.
Your complains are about user experience and user interface. The article mentions that ondsel changed the UX/UI.
I hope that FreeCAD hits its Blender Foundation point and starts to become good very quickly and eventually become arguably better than commercial tools.
Me too. This is my hope long term for FreeCAD. Ondsel’s work has been substantial in pushing it along and I think some day it’ll get there. For me, It’s my goto CAD for mechanical stuff.