[jwesthues]

> Interesting bit of trivia: SolveSpace comes from M-Labs

I developed SolveSpace, and whitequark (via M-Labs) is the current maintainer. He's responsible for all the non-Windows ports, plus the last few years of features and some significant refactoring. We hope the latter will make the codebase more accessible to other contributors.

SolveSpace's NURBS operations are worse than OpenCASCADE's, but they're literally orders of magnitude smaller. There's still no great free alternative to Parasolid, SOLIDS++, etc. SolveSpace's constraint solver is pretty good, and people seem to mostly like the UI.

[app4soft]

Jonathan, You write faster than me[0] :-)

> plus the last few years of features and some significant refactoring.

Last few years there only Alexey Egorov's new features... :-/

While 'whitequark' is good programmer, his role as maintainer very bad for SolveSpace project itself - he don't work well with community at all. He fully non-responsive to Linux users, he not want hear any ideas from community...

Project now mostly in freeze...

Hope, You will find better project manager (such as Yorik now is in FreeCAD) for SolveSpace for make it more friendly for community. 'whitequark' should be just one of SolveSpace programmer, not maintainer, IMHO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16797563

[jwesthues]

> He fully non-responsive to Linux users

Well, he was nice enough to write the Linux port in the first place, and he personally develops under Linux, so...

To develop free, general-purpose, desktop, parametric 3d CAD software is fairly thankless work. It's a huge task, and relatively few developers have the necessary mathematical skill and ME domain knowledge. The commercial market is mature, limiting opportunities to monetize. I have great respect for the time and other resources that whitequark (and others) have chosen to expend here in spite of that.

[app4soft]

It's look like nothing changed - whitequark still respond[0] to users and contributors in wrong way...

[0] https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/318

[app4soft]

I'm not say that he is bad programmer or all things that he did are bad.

Some things (i.e. in code) are really cool, but some are very bad (increasing dependency, mostly drop OpenGL1.x support, not providing official builds of SolveSpace for Linux, etc.)

I just tell, that as maintainer (project manager of open-source software) 'whitequark' is not good at all.

He always answer to users from point of coder, not from point of project manager.

I still hope that SolveSpace project could get good project manager that will give for 'whitequark' more time for coding, and take out him from communication with "stupid users"

For QA and communication with testers SolveSpace need another person, that will not be so rude as 'whitequark', IMHO.