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by DeadMouseFive
1462 days ago
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I see the need for FreeCAD to form an organization or foundation as a non-profit. This is explicitly mentioned in the wiki. https://wiki.freecad.org/Donate In FreeCAD, I see a product that is almost there, but suffers from a lack of creative leadership and business thought. Of course, it's being done by long suffering devs with little resources and time. But the truth is this could be a success on the level of Arduino or RPi if the right organizational structure was agreed upon and executed. Devs need to be paid. Labors of love never turn out as well as well funded endeavors. There are many models to point to but the one I like is RedHat. RedHat serves corporate customers for money, and delivers free products to individuals. Open source software for free but with paid support and custom development. This is the way. In my opinion this is the perfect model for a CAD system development organization. FreeCAD needs to be free for users to learn and modify. This is goes without saying and FreeCAD is popular with users IN SPITE of it's glaring flaws. If FreeCAD could be developed to a level that made it a viable choice for professionals like myself, a mechanical engineer, to trust enough to base a development toolchain on, then corporate money for enterprise level solutions would flow like water. The CAD market is ripe for disruption and a solid open source model could do that. SW costs ~$4000 plus ~$1000 per year in maintenance fees and let's be honest, it is broken but usable and has a network effect in play. But nothing they do is unique or even especially state of the art, it's stuck in the 80s. How do we make this happen HN. I see a "FreeCAD is gr8" post like once every two months and looking at it we should be able to org our way to a better solution. My DMs are open. |
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