[foobarbecue]

I have been really pleased to see Freecad's steady improvement, and I think it's only been a few years since Blender reached the the point that it was competitive with the $$$ modellers / renderers, especially from a UI standpoint. So, I'm hopeful that in a few more years, Freecad will reach "Blender level" where it really competes with SolidWorks. One big step in that direction will be for them to pick one of the assembly constraints plugins and incorporate it as a first-class feature.

A pattern I've often seen is a tortise vs the hare sort of thing between FLOSS and $$$ software. The free stuff improves slowly but steadily. The $$$ stuff changes quickly but those changes are often driven by perverse incentives (people looking for promotions, shareholder value, etc.), and development tends to go off the rails and piss off users.

[jbay808]

Agreed. FreeCAD is coming along at a good pace. One of the devs (RealThunder) maintains a development branch which fixes the topological naming problem, which was probably FreeCAD's main weakness. It's already very usable; once that fix gets merged into the main branch I think they'll be ready for the 1.0 release.