3 ms·

I disagree. Having tried most of the products on that list and their competitors, the problem isn't the math. They generally get that right enough for most appl

by crote 3y ago

I disagree. Having tried most of the products on that list and their competitors, the problem isn't the math. They generally get that right enough for most applications. The big problem is the user experience. FreeCAD has single-handedly soured me on 3D modeling in general because it is awful to work with. There are a dozen incompatible ways to do anything, and they all have weird undocumented limitations. And rather than getting basic 3D modeling working properly, they add a whole architecture workbench. We saw this with Blender a few years ago. The thing which made it go from "toy product" to "viable commercial alternative" was a huge UI overhaul in 2.7x. Something similar happened in KiCad 6. Both Blender and KiCad have attracted significant commercial backing since then and are slowly starting to become serious alternatives to their proprietary competitors.

Qwertious 3y ago
100% agree, but how do we actually make that happen? I've joined RealThunder's (major FreeCAD dev's) patreon, but other than that I'm just resigned to a long wait.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The two I’ve seen is 1. a company needs it and doesn’t care so they just make a huge investment in the tooling that they open source or 2. someone with a lot of free time/independently wealthy just puts their head down and goes at it.
- crote 3y ago
  Get someone who cares to throw their weight behind it. You need a way to get developers to a) care about it, and b) do a lot of non-fun work. A Patreon isn't going to work because then the devs just end up doing more of the things they enjoy. It seems like getting a commercial company behind it is pretty much the only way to do it. You just can't tell an independent developer that the UI of their pet project sucks and they need to spend six months rewriting it from scratch. Heck, getting them to agree that the UI sucks is pretty much impossible already! Stuff like this is a lot easier when your primary incentive is "being paid a salary" rather than "having fun with my pet project".

by crote 3y ago

Qwertious 3y ago

100% agree, but how do we actually make that happen? I've joined RealThunder's (major FreeCAD dev's) patreon, but other than that I'm just resigned to a long wait.

bombcar 3y ago
The two I’ve seen is 1. a company needs it and doesn’t care so they just make a huge investment in the tooling that they open source or 2. someone with a lot of free time/independently wealthy just puts their head down and goes at it.
crote 3y ago
Get someone who cares to throw their weight behind it. You need a way to get developers to a) care about it, and b) do a lot of non-fun work. A Patreon isn't going to work because then the devs just end up doing more of the things they enjoy. It seems like getting a commercial company behind it is pretty much the only way to do it. You just can't tell an independent developer that the UI of their pet project sucks and they need to spend six months rewriting it from scratch. Heck, getting them to agree that the UI sucks is pretty much impossible already! Stuff like this is a lot easier when your primary incentive is "being paid a salary" rather than "having fun with my pet project".