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by wakeupcall 1550 days ago
So external contributors can only provide patches without being able to test themselves I suppose.

Is the c3d dev license cheap enough for determined contributors to join? As in, cheaper than a f360 maker license?

I do not mean this in any pejorative sense. As a dev/maker I kept an eye on c3d for a long time, since that seems the only advanced-enough and commercially affordable brep kernel around to get off the ground quickly.

However, there's no discussion the closed nature pretty much bars any sort of in-depth contributor.

At least, contributing to a project like this would be extremely off-putting for me, to the point that besides having the ability to look a bit deeper than usual, I question whether keeping the source open does much.

1 comments

> So external contributors can only provide patches without being able to test themselves I suppose.

My intention is that if you buy a license for plasticity, you can then build locally and test locally. You can contribute back or not depending on your interest.

Think of it like this. There will be a typescript/javascript wrapper around a limited version of the c3d kernel. this is the plasticity api. You will call plasticity.Enable(license_key) at the top of your program and you will be good to go. You buy a license key from me.

Although I do hope people will contribute the plasticity's development, my main goal with it being open source is that people will write plugins that they can then give away or sell themselves.

I have used commercial software that I pay for -- like Fusion 360 and MoI3d -- where I ran into bugs that I could have fixed for myself if only I had the code. I'm still happy to pay for them. Instead I literally waited 2 years for Fusion to fix a bug I cared about.

I'd be raising both eyebrows if c3d allowed this. That would be a very non-conventional licensing model.
It is for sure a murky area where I'm working out the details. You don't have the full kernel. But you can think of it a bit like a scripting API on top of the kernel, which is not uncommon in CAD apps, like OnShape's FeatureScript or something.