11 ms·

We are shutting down Ondsel

317 points by pabs3 2y ago

elashri 2y ago
Sometimes I envy that although I am not a SWE. I work in a field that is so close with the open source and tech scene that we don't have to rely on commercial products like some other fields. It is hard to compete or gain enough interest in some fields of engineering to any open or free solutions.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. I've seen this in the software world too, with embedded systems engineers, though Linux, gcc, etc. has made huge inroads here, though it took decades, and mainly came from the Linux adherents pushing downwards into the embedded space from the desktop space, not from any interest by the existing engineers in the embedded space. Just look, for instance, at FPGAs: almost all the tooling is proprietary, very expensive, and very buggy too. Or look at PCB design: Altium seems to be the standard here still, despite Kicad having made huge advances and by most accounts being as good or even better. It took decades (Kicad started in 1992) for the FOSS alternatives here to really catch on much, and only really because PCBs became cheap enough for hobbyists to design and construct their own (mainly because of Chinese PCB companies), and because CERN contributed some resources. I'm not sure what the deal is with engineers hating collaboratively-developed and freely-available software, but it's a real thing in my experience. It's like someone told them that FOSS is "socialism" and they just reflexively dismiss or hate it.
  - 20after4 2y ago
    This doesn't really explain any hostility towards open tools but it does explain much of the preference for certain well established commercial packages: The commercial software vendors do a great job of marketing to engineering schools and students. Once you learn some software it's a lot of work to relearn. So if you get people accustomed to your proprietary ecosystem early in their schooling and during the start of the career, you have pretty much hooked them for life.
    - WJW 2y ago
      If that were the case, most of the (academic) software world would still run on Matlab and Borland. Instead, Python has completely taken over that space even without salespeople to push it. Most of the open source CAD stuff is just Not That Good.
  - 15155 2y ago
    > Altium seems to be the standard here still Apple and NVIDIA are using Allegro (or customized versions thereof.) > or even better KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. > very expensive Vivado is free for a great number of devices (not just the "lite" version, either, depending on the board - U50, U55, etc.) No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation.
    - _fizz_buzz_ 2y ago
      > KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. That seems like a matter of taste. We switched from Altium to KiCad and I very much prefer it. We don't do any RF stuff, so there might be things that don't quite work in KiCad, but for what we do - power electronics - it works perfectly well.
      - cellular 2y ago
        I wish they kicad footprints were easier to find/modify/maintain. I modified some its hard to reuse them in other designs. They get saved in places with lots of extra files and I'm not sure how to merge with other designs.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. Not what I've heard, and CERN seems to think it's good enough for their particle colliders. >No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation. Yes, FPGA tools are a very different matter. I do wonder if this is really lock-in from vendors more than any preference by users, but still, sufficiently motivated users could reverse-engineer things to try to make a single open-source toolset that works with all vendors' FPGAs. Of course, the feasibility of this is questionable, but we've seen really impressive reverse-engineering efforts in other places in FOSS. Just look at how futile it is for YouTube to try to prevent people from downloading their videos.
      - hn492912 2y ago
        Large institutions like CERN run everything. But the advanced stuff is definitely not on KiCAD. It doesn't have support for the right simulation models. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/cern-selects-cadence-services-to-create-and-maintain-design-environments-for-internal-teams-and-partners/ https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/cern-selects-cadence-service... "The CERN physics department is deploying the Cadence analog and digital end-to-end solutions as well as the Cadence verification and Allegro PCB solutions throughout the support of its CERN IT department."
  - consp 2y ago
    With respect to cad suites it's push from the top. That starts at education where sweet deals are made to force students to use one specific suite while it should not matter what you use.
  - arlcode 2y ago
    I wonder whether it is a about quality control and completeness. Pure Software has a lot slack when it comes to delivering incomplete or (in the FOSS world ) even partially incorrect releases. Many issues can be fixed after the fact (even in production) and you can inch closer to a better version as time come goes on. Mechanical engineering oftentimes can't work that way. An "80% solution machine" usually doesn't work at all and iteration costs (outside of 3d prototyping) can be staggeringly high. Example: My company produces heavy "things" (20tons+) that have tight tolerances in some places. If the design is off by 2mm because of a CAD bug or unexpected/unknown UI the part could be scrap or require an expensive (read manual) rework. There go all your software savings. So why management would love to reduce the staggeringly high costs it's not worth the risk until an alternative is very proven. In many projects customers contractually require is to use a specific solution.
    - SirHumphrey 2y ago
      And even if the software doesn’t cost you in failed projects it can cost you in other ways. The old meme from 10 years ago about: “Linux being free if your time is free” is largely false for personal usage, but in the corporate environment somebody will have to provide support and with the open source software this is going to be you. People selling B2B software know that so they will usually price things in a way that it is just a bit cheaper to pay them rather then support and retrain staff.
  - leoedin 2y ago
    I don't think it's simply "engineers hate open source". Most of the open source tools in the embedded space are just a bit crap. The reality is that good software needs many thousands of hours of development time. The embedded space is actually pretty small in development budget terms - so fewer engineers who might devote time - and also there's less overlap in skillset - electronic design engineers rarely have the software skills required to develop EDA software. Most of the incredibly well used robust open source packages are sponsored by large tech companies. The embedded space just hasn't had that kind of sponsorship.
    - regularfry 2y ago
      I suspect it's the ways in which they are a bit crap. All software is a bit crap one way or another. FreeCAD's UI is "a bit crap". The "workbench" metaphor is fine as a metaphor, but the specific way the workbenches are put together in FreeCAD is oriented more towards the way the functionality is implemented than what the user wants to do with it. You have no choice but to understand technical implementation details. That's just one example, but that attitude to UI in FreeCAD is absolutely pervasive. I think that's a general problem in the space. The user interfaces in general aren't designed, they're an outgrowth of the direct implementation of the underlying functionality.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        Yes. You’ll have a hard time finding a full-time professional photographer that hasn’t tried Gimp, and an even harder time finding one that still uses it. That’s not even getting into graphic designers— Gimp’s typography tools are awful. Open source software that’s useable— more recent blender versions, Inkscape, Firefox, Signal— is the only stuff that’s caught on in large part because they deliberately enfranchise designers. As an experienced, art school trained designer with far more than enough full-time coding experience to implement my own designs, I still exclusively contribute code to FOSS projects as a developer. I’ve seen both sides of this and am perpetually dispirited by the dismissive, haughty, and frankly ignorant attitudes towards designers among many developers. FOSS interfaces are put together by and for people who a) have a working mental model of software functioning, so they reason about interfaces differently, b) know more about the code than the problem domain, c) are used to and pride themselves on learning complex systems based on a set of complex docs. Until changes, user-facing FOSS applications will be used by developers no matter how useful they would be to others.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    > Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. Probably because if you complain about bugs or problems in open-source software, a legion of trolls comes to tell you "erm, it's open source, you can just implement it yourself" no matter how skilled the user is at programming. Like, for example, the lead dev of Inkscape, who used to (not sure if he still does) go around on twitter looking up complaints about how slow Inkscape is on macOS and then complain about them being entitled. No wonder they don't want to use it, then, if it's considered rude to even expect the software to work.
    - regularfry 2y ago
      Yeah, this is a non-trivial effect. It affects FreeCAD too. Mostly contained to the forums, but if you ask a question it's wise to give people who actually know what they're talking about a couple of days to show up.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        I think part of it is also the user knowing that they have no right to express frustration when the product is free. That's actually a mental burden. In a sense, people buy software partly so they feel they have the right to complain when it has issues. And honestly I think that's pretty reasonable
        regularfry 2y ago
        No, they do have the right to express frustration. What they don't have is the right to demand work from anyone else, but what tends to happen is that communities are on such a hair trigger for the latter that they reject the former even when the frustration is directly caused by a solvable problem.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        Well the thing is, if you buy a product you do have the right to demand work from someone else, and that's why people buy products
  - typewithrhythm 2y ago
    If I have two solutions I don't expect to easily work, one is free and one comes with an expensive support contact, then I will weigh the cost of the support against the value of the whole project. Often the support is worth it, because I can have a conversation with someone early in the process. If I commit to open source then I either need to hire an expert (this does not get the same guarantee as a support contract) or live with much more uncertainty.
  - hn492912 2y ago
    For non-SW engineers, like myself, software is a means, not an end, and FOSS or not FOSS is irrelevant. To get a EDA tool to a useable condition, and debugged to the point where it is reliable enough to actually use, is just a ton of work. As someone who wants to design circuits, why should I do that work? How will it help me design more circuits? I understand why beginners and casual users don't like them because the EDA tools do have a huge learning curve, but once you're there, they are very productive. For professional engineers the software license is not really a significant barrier. Compared to the cost of labor, materials and equipment it's basically a noop.
    - moooo99 2y ago
      > and FOSS or not FOSS is irrelevant. I don’t think this is universally applicable. I think you can differentiate software by how important it is. Some software is at the very core of your business. A CAD, a ECAD, some lab software or a video editing program. Realistically, if you cannot justify the expensive of that software for your business, you probably don’t have a business. Many of those apps require substantial R&D to get right, something you can only afford if you make real money by building it. But there are other supporting applications that are not as close to your value add as your core apps, but they can still sleep you over real bad if the vendor goes bust or raises prices into the sky. That may be a teams chat app, a mail client, a wiki software. Most of those apps are essentially the infrastructure of any business nowadays and are relatively solved problems. In this area OSS really shines and reduces a lot of the vendor risk.
    - goku12 2y ago
      None of the points you make is universally true. FOSS means that there is less of a chance of the rug being pulled from under you in the form of subscription services nobody asked for. This has been a repeated annoyance with one certain company which did that recently for an ECAD tool and an MCAD tool. And, there are enough motivated people who do a ton of work to make FOSS software reliable enough. In fact, MCAD is an exception in that area. We have world class FOSS operating systems, 3D animations systems and development tools in an endless list. Even Blender, which was not very popular a decade ago, suddenly gained recognition. FOSS ECAD is on the way and it will happen some day for FOSS MCAD too. Finally the license cost. The cost of proprietary software - especially engineering and scientific software is exorbitant in countries with better purchase power parity. Much less would happen in those sectors in such places if it weren't for the large repository of FOSS software available to them.
  - rleigh 2y ago
    It's because these tools are used to deliver high quality physical products on time and on budget with no scope or interest in messing around with software defects. These tools are treated like physical tools. It's worth paying for a high quality one which won't cause unexpected grief, by people who will provide immediate support because we pay them. I think if there were good quality open source equivalents they would be considered, but they pose a huge risk, possibly even an existential risk, if they derail our development plans unexpectedly. Paying a lot of money for seriously good quality tools reduces that risk dramatically. I've had a brief look at FreeCAD, and it's got a lot of potential. But when you compare it with SolidWorks, OnShape or SolidEdge, there's clearly a huge gap in usability and capability which needs closing before a lot of people will be able to consider it seriously. I'm sure it will eventually get there, like KiCAD did, but it will take many years and a lot of investment to get the usability, polish and featureset up to parity. It looks like Ondsel did a really good job to make some progress along that path.
    - xyzzy123 2y ago
      I agree although I feel like one could easily make the exact same comments regarding compilers. I can't quite pin down why there would be many free (for various values of free) industry standard compilers but not cad programs.
      - whyever 2y ago
        Open Source works best for building blocks of software, not for end products. Companies have incentives to share their libraries and tooling, not so much for the final product like a CAD program.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Because those compilers are mostly sponsored by OS companies to outsource their software development costs in part. Also notice that all compilers for scenarios where liability is actually imposed, like in physical goods, most compilers are closed source, proprietary, and certified.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
  - Xelbair 2y ago
    >I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions The problem is that usually open source solutions are really, really rough around the edges from UX perspective - and it could be minor edge cases for programmer! - but for engineer they are a dealbreakers. Look at it from the engineer PoV - they could learn industry standard CAD solution that works, has relatively good(depending who you ask and which version they started with) UI/UX .. and it's something they employer pays for. I worked with civil engineers that tried multiple different 2D CAD software packages and frankly, all of them hate Autodesk as a company, but they still did pick AutoCAD. They did have different preferences for specific AutoCAD version though. Honestly the core problem is that there's no pressure from clients on open source software to have a good UX, because there are no clients - just users and developers.
    - robinsonb5 2y ago
      The other problem is that sometimes from the perspective of an experienced user, "good UX" means "works exactly like the piece of software I've been using on a daily basis for the last 15 years." Even if a brand new UI is objectively better, to someone who's invested thousands of hours in becoming fluent, fast and efficient with an existing UI (however quirky or obtuse it might be) the new UI will be an impediment to productivity.
      - Xelbair 2y ago
        Sure, but that's not unique to open source software. it is a form of soft vendor lock in.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. Well if you're dealing with projects worth 7 figures (or more), it absolutely makes sense to go for a commercial project with SLAs on support. Last thing you want is to hit some showstopper bug, holding up people who earn 4-digit daily compensation, and been told to "figure stuff out yourself". If you as the author of a FOSS project that isn't a household name already for historical reasons (like, say, OpenSSL or cURL) and you want it being used by anyone else than hobbyists and universities, you won't get around establishing some sort of corporate infrastructure to sell support contracts.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    I’m a software guy. I love FOSS. Much of the tooling that I use is FOSS, and oftentimes the software is as good if not better than the proprietary equivalent. Until very recently, this was not the case in hardware world. In many cases it’s still not the case. You will meet all sorts of purists here that will tell you FreeCAD is good enough, for instance. Well, I tried using FreeCAD to build a hardware product. And eventually switched to proprietary software because FreeCAD could not satisfy my use case. I made a genuine effort to use the FOSS variant, but it was not usable for me. I’m more inclined to listen in hardware when someone says the FOSS tools are not good enough after that experience.
    - arlcode 2y ago
      FreeCAD moved from "barely usable for hobby projects" to "yeah maybe if I'm really inclined to try it on a very a simple professional project". At least that's what my engineering colleague told me recently. Which is a massive improvement and the result of many hours of fixing "boring" bugs, improving UX and all the other chores nobody wants to do. But for most commercial work it's not yet there.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - linsomniac 2y ago
    I'm a hobbyist and over the last month have been improving my 3D modeling chops. Because it's a hobby, the cost of the tools hasn't been an issue. I started with Ondsel, and it looks like a really good tool. I went through a couple of hours of a tutorial, and it looked pretty good. But then a friend reminded me of the Fusion 360 hobbyist plans, and I decided to give it a try, just to see. It blew my socks off! It's just a lot more refined. The first 12 minute tutorial took me further than I'd gone in the ~2 hours I did with Ondsel. FreeCAD is an amazing piece of software to be available for free. But in the end Fusion just operated a little more smoothly in lots of little ways. I have really limited time to do 3D modeling, so it's pretty valuable to me to get more done quickly. One temporary thing that's making FreeCAD a bit hard to get started with is that there's not much content out there for learning 1.0, and sifting through out of date content to find it took some work. That'll improve as time goes on.
  - mft_ 2y ago
    I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'd frame it as: people who want to get stuff done and who can't or don't want to have to fight or troubleshoot their software or the system it runs on will often have to choose non-open-source options. Some examples, from my perspective of being an enthusiastic and reasonably tech-savvy hobbyist: * Linux is almost always a huge pain to get running well. In contrast, MacOS almost always just works, and while Windows can be a bit more janky, it very rarely needs countless hours spent on e.g. Ubuntu forums or Stackoverflow trying random fixes until one does (or doesn't) work. Of course there are reasons for this, but it is true. (Will next year be the year of Linux on the desktop?) * Python is something I fundamentally love and use frequently, but I'm not the first to notice the terrible UX when it comes to managing different versions of Python itself, and its packages. Note that virtually every Python-based project on Gibhub (which is lots, thanks to ML) comes with a different set of instructions to get it running, usually based on a different distribution or package manager, thanks to an n+1 problem-solving approach [0] from the Python community. You can often run into huge issues simply installing a single popular package (looking at you, OpenCV). * FreeCAD... I'm an enthusiastic mid-level CADder, and have used several different commercial packages without a problem. FreeCAD is just awful currently - fundamental issues/incompatibilities betewen the different modules within the base system, a terrible ugly UI, an unncecssarily steep learning curve (even for someone well-versed in CAD). And of course the answers to (some of) these problems are suited to the limux hacker - "oh just install so-and-so's fork instead". Really? And you're surprised it doesn't take off with the hobbyist community? * Dearpygui.. a lovely, performant GUI for Python, but with such terrible documentation that for anything beyond the (sparse) examples, you have to resort to asking questions on Discord. (They are reponsive and friendly, though.) * GIMP - powerful... and just crappy to use. My basic premise is that most open-source products are designed and coded by hardcore programmers/Linux experts, who are great coders but either don't care about or don't have skills in optimising UI/UX/usability. Maybe it's the much-derided product managers (i.e. not hardcore programmers/Linux experts) who bring usability to a project. Maybe open source needs to work on attracting non-coders to its projects, and be open to listening to their criticism? [0] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
    - epcoa 2y ago
      > Python is something I fundamentally love and use frequently, but I'm not the first to notice the terrible UX when it comes to managing different versions of Python itself, and its packages. Python’s ecosystem looks like a trash fire and sits along nicely with JavaScript (they burn brightly in subtly different ways). Neither are concerned with adoption at this point though. > Maybe open source needs to work on attracting non-coders to its projects I think Python is proof that the economic realities are more nuanced than this.
  - MegaDeKay 2y ago
    Almost all the tooling in FPGAs is proprietary because the vendors don't provide the information needed to develop open source tools around them. They'll also often obsfucate the bitstreams to make the reverse engineering process more difficult. Progress is being made but it is a slow and painstaking process.
  - aseipp 2y ago
    In the case of FPGAs it doesn't really matter that the proprietary tools are buggy. What matters is the features and utility they have. Open-source FPGA design is still extremely, extremely far behind the proprietary alternatives in many dimensions (power support, integration tools, many aspects of simulation and test, general tools like floorplanners, and so on.) That isn't because people aren't trying either. It's just really hard and has limited talent pool. I've spent a lot of time at this point with both toolkits. I use the open source tooling extensively for my own designs. But you tell some grizzled RTL person there's no power analyzer or native SDC support or that UTM was only recently supported in some simulator, and they're going to laugh at you. They've been doing that stuff for 20 years. I know this because I've done it several times (though other people find particular things, like free RTL verification tools, much appreciated.) I think FOSS/software people paint some very rose-tinted picture in their mind where the mere availability of something for $0 would make it an obvious choice, even at only 10% of the functionality. But that's not how people see it in reality. Many people, including engineers, think of it the other way: if it's so good, why is it $0 and how do I know it will keep being developed? They've made their peace with the fact that the $5000 tool will exist practically for as long as they need, get the job done, and be supported.
- kiba 2y ago
  Perhaps you mean proprietary. Ondsel is after all a commercial project. The fact remains that proprietary software seem to be a license to print money, and with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. This is a uphill battle for open source software, but it seems that open source software tend to keep improving in the long run.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. It seems like proprietary software has a big advantage when there's still lots of room for improvement, so that investment in further development pays off. However, in some cases, there's little room for real improvement, and the thing becomes a "solved problem" for the most part. At this point, the proprietary companies then start enshittifying the software (look at Photoshop, now a cloud-based program) to try to extract more money from users, and to keep users on the upgrade treadmill. Part of this is probably from the way corporate politics work: when you're a manager with a team in place, you need something to keep that team busy, to justify your team's continued employment to upper management, so when you run out of useful improvements to make, you invent less-than-useful "improvements" (e.g., ugly new UIs). This is where FOSS seems to be able to do well: it doesn't need to waste resources on useless improvements (we'll ignore GNOME for a moment as an exception), and can just focus on delivering the necessary functionality. Once that's done, it can just go into maintenance mode and people can move on to other projects. Until then, it can continue to improve and attract users to switch from the enshittifying proprietary stuff.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      GNOME, several reboots of the audio stack, XWindows versus Wayland,... FOSS only does well when it isn't the main source of income for contributors.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Wayland has its issues to be sure, but the X Window System was no longer suitable for modern systems; the justification for replacing it was quite sound. GNOME I'll heartily agree on. But I've never liked GNOME myself (v1 seemed OK though) and have always criticized that project. I've always been a KDE fan, though admittedly they've had some similar problems and have handled some major changes rather poorly (esp. 4.0). Really, the desktop environments are one place where FOSS hasn't really done that well, frequently re-inventing the wheel for questionable reasons, or adopting questionable new design philosophies. At least there's a fair amount of competition in the space, so if one project rubs you the wrong way, you can try another; this proliferation of competitors also shows just how much disagreement there is in the community on this particular matter. I really don't know enough about the audio stack changes; I can only guess that they found big problems with older solutions there which required major architectural changes, esp. for certain high-performance applications.
- pabs3 2y ago
  In which fields can one rely on open source?
  - elashri 2y ago
    To name few that I am aware of. - Particle Physics - Astrophysics - Genomics - Quantum Chemistry - Molecular Chemistry - Robotics - Geospatial analysis - Epidemiology - Medical imaging
    - _dabs 2y ago
      Most of math also (with the exception if you Matlab for compatibility reason)
    - cozzyd 2y ago
      Even in particle/astrophysics we rely on proprietary FPGA Vendor tools, in proprietary electronics design tools (ok, kicad is seeing increasing adoption), and often proprietary embedded tools (depending on the microcontroller vendor). Not to mention proprietary graphics drivers (CUDA), CAD tools (Solidworks, Solidedge), mechanical or e&m simulation (comsol, Ansys, xfdtd, wipl-d, etc). A fair number of people use IDL or Matlab too and mathematica is pervasive among theorists. Probably nobody uses Origin anymore. We've gone backwards on documents since everybody is using overleaf now. It's true most of the software we develop, if made public, is open source.
      - elashri 2y ago
        Yes there are still pockets of proprietary tools but is of limited usage. Most of people in the field is not going to use them (because they don't work on these things). And most of these tools are tied to the hardware and there is increasing adoption like you said for kicad and FreeCAD. There are two exceptions which are theorists love for Mathematica and CUDA for GPU programming on NVIDIA GPUs. For CUDA, it is not bad as you don't pay per usage or don't have contacts, you do this because you purchased NVIDIA GPUs. Which is the best in the world for the use case we have in particle physics experiments. I have never seen someone in the HEP community or Astrophysics using Matlab. Regarding overleaf, it is open source and you can self-host the community edition for free or self-host professional instance and pay subscription.
arrobbiato 2y ago
Thanks, Ondsel - it was a worthy and welcome attempt. And you left FreeCAD much better off than when you found it. For that reason, Ondsel may be shutting down, but it is anything but a failure.
dangsux 2y ago
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schaefer 2y ago
Truly bummed about this one. I’d been learning CAD with Ondsel, and have printed off half-a-dozen of my models to help around the house. If this comment finds its way to the team, I just want to say thanks. The topo naming fix and the assembly workbench were enormous contributions to the community that will be with us always. But I really believed in Ondsel’s vision for an online repo for 3d models.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  These are the kinds of projects I would love for philanthropic billionaires to get behind rather than political garbage. It’s something that can serve everyone everywhere
- prokoudine 2y ago
  It did find its way to the team, thank you :)
rcarmo 2y ago
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- Tomte 2y ago
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  - aurareturn 2y ago
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    - dang 2y ago
      Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome on HN so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't be rude. It's enough to politely explain that if a story hasn't had significant attention yet, reposts aren't treated as dupes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
mmmore 2y ago
It's sad that this is failing, and sadder still that I, an occasional CAD user, never heard of it even though I really wanted something like this (at least in theory).
IshKebab 2y ago
Unfortunate but extremely predictable. The commercial market for CAD cares about CAD that actually works, not free software ideals. FreeCAD is simply not in the same league as commercial CAD like Solidworks, NX, Creo, etc. IMO it's not even in the same league as SolveSpace, at least last time I used it (which was admittedly some years ago).
- LordHeini 2y ago
  It was absolutely worth a try. Blender suffered the same sort of issues as FreeCAD does, but managed to get out of the slump. It is often important to have a main player enforcing proper, unified UI/UX and fix the many small problems and bugs which drive users away. Sadly it is usually an issue with long running and highly complex open source software that it gets really fragmented. You see that in every function having its own button or workspace, inconsistent naming, functions which do the same but slightly different and things working differently depending on some context where they really should not. Thanks to the people from Ondsel it felt like FreeCad would be on a similar route to Blender. It was way more user friendly thankfully there has been major back porting. So there has been a lot of progress especially with the upcoming 1.0. You should give one of the Release Candidates a try. I use it for my 3D printing projects and it works pretty well.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  The parent comment rephrased: 'oh it was a useless effort like any other effort to push open source in CAD'. (Not true btw, Blender is an institution in non-parametric design, the niche for open-source is just for parametric CAD). How is open source supposed to break through to this 'market' as you call it? Should we just give up instead?
  - Double_a_92 2y ago
    I think the main sentiment was more about FreeCAD being extremely bad to use, and not against Ondsel's efforts to make it better. I just tried installing the new RC of FreeCAD, and it's still a horrible horrible unusable mess (despite all the improvements of Ondsel). Anyone trying is probably better off starting from scratch on the GUI, and only extracting the algorithmic bits from FreeCad.
phoronixrly 2y ago
I've just started using FreeCAD after bouncing around Solidworks, Onshape and Fusion360. The changes in 1.0 are more than welcome! Thank you for your contributions!
- daghamm 2y ago
  I learned freecad some years but never really liked it. Fast forward to version 1.0, it feels like a huge improvement and I think k I will try to use it again for smaller projects. The biggest improvement IMO was the partial sketch thing, which I can't even find among the release notes... https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 I was sceptic first, but 1.0 turned out had some major improveme
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    It is! It is totally usable for my hobby projects that I overkilled with Fusion360. Btw Fusion 360 crashes as often as FreeCAD 1.0 for me, despite its holier-than-thou maker.
loufe 2y ago
Every time I have a personal project and want to make a simple CAD drawing of a building or a simple model, as I would using AutoCAD at work, I go through the same song and dance. I look around at the options online, my jaw hangs open at the cost of any commercial CAD subscription/licence, then I get frustrated by a glaring lack of functionality or useability while trying some free/open source solution, and resort to a 30 day trial or MSPaint/paper. Some of the comments already mention how blender's existence is predicated upon it filling a niche in certain senses, instead of trying to achieve feature parity with an entrenched giant. That makes sense, and it's unfortunate, as this space could use an open source option with Blender's polish. In my own industry, mining, I am certain some commercial interests would happily make their product an extension/plugin for a polished FreeCAD (or other), were it at that point.
- jitl 2y ago
  Have you tried OnShape? It’s not open source but it is totally free for hobby use.
  - encom 2y ago
    I hate it because it's a website. I want actual software. Free software ideally.
    - klysm 2y ago
      I understand the gripes with web-based platforms, but its performance is pretty impressive. They've done a good job with it.
      - inhumantsar 2y ago
        same here. if I want to slap together a quick model or sketch, it takes seconds in onshape vs minutes in f360. I've even loaded projects into my phone's browser while out to view sketches or assemblies.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
ponow 2y ago
Ignoring the entertainment industry, if there were no copyright for software applications beyond that which can be achieved by contract, what would the CAD software landscape be like? Clearly it would exist, but with a completely different revenue model. Predictions?
pbronez 2y ago
Real bummer. I’m keeping an eye on Zoo (fka KittyCAD) for my personal CAD work https://zoo.dev/ https://zoo.dev/
- Double_a_92 2y ago
  Am I missing something, or is that just a fancy openSCAD?
  - pbronez 2y ago
    Zoo and openSCAD both create 3D objects using code in a domain specific language. Other than that, very different. OpenSCAD has limited ambitions; Zoo wants to kill Autodesk. Zoo is building a commercial grade product suite from first principles. They're writing a new geometry kernel and optimizing it for GPUs. They wrote a new domain specific language for CAD [0]. They're running the kernel on the cloud behind an API, streaming video to the client and billing by the server-minute. Ideally that will deliver great performance and keep the tool accessible to casual users. The really exciting thing, for me anyway, is they want to unify design-by-code, design-by-mouse, and design-by-ai. Start with a plain language description of what you want. Get a fully parametric object on your screen. Click around making adjustments. Pull up the code and make precise changes. Keep a complete changelog in git. Anyway, much more detail here: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomo... [0] https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-samples https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-samples
    - Double_a_92 2y ago
      > They're running the kernel on the cloud behind an API, streaming video to the client and billing by the server-minute. That sounds absolutely horrible though. There is no chance of it being truly free because the servers cost money. You are fully locked-in in that system. It won't work offline. You can't use it for secret projects... Unless it's intended for companies to run the API on their own servers?
lazulicurio 2y ago
This is a huge shame. Ondsel brought much-needed focus to the freecad development process. I hope that with them gone the project doesn't revert to the mindset of "everyone gets their own fiefdom (workbench) to manage" that's resulted in instabilities and fractured user experience in the past.
ddtaylor 2y ago
I have a project that turns Blender into something like Tinkercad. I want help with some Blender gurus though. I made it for my wife because once her designs get too complex Tinkercad servers crash and stop exporting.
WillAdams 2y ago
For a long while, I was trying to track CAD applications for a wiki for a then opensource CNC: https://web.archive.org/web/20211126210706/https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/CAD https://web.archive.org/web/20211126210706/https://wiki.shap... (trying to get that back into shape at: https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki/cad https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki/cad ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D) and FreeCAD seemed simultaneously the most ambitious, and the most promising --- hopefully v1.0 will pay off on that, and result in a tool which can be used widely --- but it will eventually need some sort of commercial support. Ondsel seemed a good fit for that, and it's unfortunate that they didn't make it. Notable other options include: - Solvespace --- a venerable and simple tool, it is barebones to the extent that many folks won't be able to accept it - Dune 3D --- this is an incredibly elegant and usable tool, which I hope FreeCAD will look to in terms of UI, previously discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068 - BRL-CAD --- _the_ venerable choice, but the interface is so old school and programming-like, most folks won't even consider it - OpenSCAD --- 3D modeling for programmers --- the great thing about it is, anything which one can describe mathematically can be modeled --- the awful thing about it is, what one can model is limited by one's mathematical knowledge. A further concern is that DXFs from it are just polylines, no arcs --- I've been working to address that using OpenPythonSCAD at: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview LibreCAD is workable for 2D, though I only use it for file conversion. The other notable options are OnShape (free for public designs), Alibre (quite affordable), Solidworks for Makers (for values which include non-commercial usage watermarking).
- pbronez 2y ago
  OpenSCAD is my go-to. It's self-contained and AI coding tools know the syntax well enough to help you move fast. Unfortunately I keep hitting a complexity ceiling. If it doesn't like how I'm describing something, it crashes. I have to load an older version of my .scad and try a new approach. This usually happens 70% of the way into a complex project, which is quite discouraging. The Python ecosystem has CadQuery[0] and a few other tools built around the Open Cascade kernel[1] which is quite good in my limited experience. CadQuery is positioned as an OpenSCAD alternative [2], and I really want it to be. Unfortunately the user experience isn't there yet. Making an object with CadQuery is writing a Python program. Which means you need a Python environment and dev setup. CQ-editor [3] is nice, but needs a Python environment first. I think CadQuery would be much more viable OpenSCAD alternative if it was packaged into a standalone CQ-editor application and published via homebrew, etc. I'm also interest in Zoo [4](fka KittyCAD). They're trying to create a modelling tool that combines model-by-code and model-by-mouse. With some AI layered on top. They have an interesting architecture where they stream geometry to your local device from the cloud. Should be great for performance, but ties you to the cloud. [0] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology [2] https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cadquery-instead-of-openscad https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad... [3] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor [4] https://zoo.dev/ https://zoo.dev/

317 points by pabs3 2y ago

Sometimes I envy that although I am not a SWE. I work in a field that is so close with the open source and tech scene that we don't have to rely on commercial products like some other fields. It is hard to compete or gain enough interest in some fields of engineering to any open or free solutions.

shiroiushi 2y ago
Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. I've seen this in the software world too, with embedded systems engineers, though Linux, gcc, etc. has made huge inroads here, though it took decades, and mainly came from the Linux adherents pushing downwards into the embedded space from the desktop space, not from any interest by the existing engineers in the embedded space. Just look, for instance, at FPGAs: almost all the tooling is proprietary, very expensive, and very buggy too. Or look at PCB design: Altium seems to be the standard here still, despite Kicad having made huge advances and by most accounts being as good or even better. It took decades (Kicad started in 1992) for the FOSS alternatives here to really catch on much, and only really because PCBs became cheap enough for hobbyists to design and construct their own (mainly because of Chinese PCB companies), and because CERN contributed some resources. I'm not sure what the deal is with engineers hating collaboratively-developed and freely-available software, but it's a real thing in my experience. It's like someone told them that FOSS is "socialism" and they just reflexively dismiss or hate it.
- 20after4 2y ago
  This doesn't really explain any hostility towards open tools but it does explain much of the preference for certain well established commercial packages: The commercial software vendors do a great job of marketing to engineering schools and students. Once you learn some software it's a lot of work to relearn. So if you get people accustomed to your proprietary ecosystem early in their schooling and during the start of the career, you have pretty much hooked them for life.
  - WJW 2y ago
    If that were the case, most of the (academic) software world would still run on Matlab and Borland. Instead, Python has completely taken over that space even without salespeople to push it. Most of the open source CAD stuff is just Not That Good.
- 15155 2y ago
  > Altium seems to be the standard here still Apple and NVIDIA are using Allegro (or customized versions thereof.) > or even better KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. > very expensive Vivado is free for a great number of devices (not just the "lite" version, either, depending on the board - U50, U55, etc.) No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation.
  - _fizz_buzz_ 2y ago
    > KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. That seems like a matter of taste. We switched from Altium to KiCad and I very much prefer it. We don't do any RF stuff, so there might be things that don't quite work in KiCad, but for what we do - power electronics - it works perfectly well.
    - cellular 2y ago
      I wish they kicad footprints were easier to find/modify/maintain. I modified some its hard to reuse them in other designs. They get saved in places with lots of extra files and I'm not sure how to merge with other designs.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >KiCad is faster, absolutely not better. Not what I've heard, and CERN seems to think it's good enough for their particle colliders. >No open source tooling can even remotely compare in ASIC implementation flow or FPGA implementation. Yes, FPGA tools are a very different matter. I do wonder if this is really lock-in from vendors more than any preference by users, but still, sufficiently motivated users could reverse-engineer things to try to make a single open-source toolset that works with all vendors' FPGAs. Of course, the feasibility of this is questionable, but we've seen really impressive reverse-engineering efforts in other places in FOSS. Just look at how futile it is for YouTube to try to prevent people from downloading their videos.
    - hn492912 2y ago
      Large institutions like CERN run everything. But the advanced stuff is definitely not on KiCAD. It doesn't have support for the right simulation models. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/cern-selects-cadence-services-to-create-and-maintain-design-environments-for-internal-teams-and-partners/ https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/cern-selects-cadence-service... "The CERN physics department is deploying the Cadence analog and digital end-to-end solutions as well as the Cadence verification and Allegro PCB solutions throughout the support of its CERN IT department."
- consp 2y ago
  With respect to cad suites it's push from the top. That starts at education where sweet deals are made to force students to use one specific suite while it should not matter what you use.
- arlcode 2y ago
  I wonder whether it is a about quality control and completeness. Pure Software has a lot slack when it comes to delivering incomplete or (in the FOSS world ) even partially incorrect releases. Many issues can be fixed after the fact (even in production) and you can inch closer to a better version as time come goes on. Mechanical engineering oftentimes can't work that way. An "80% solution machine" usually doesn't work at all and iteration costs (outside of 3d prototyping) can be staggeringly high. Example: My company produces heavy "things" (20tons+) that have tight tolerances in some places. If the design is off by 2mm because of a CAD bug or unexpected/unknown UI the part could be scrap or require an expensive (read manual) rework. There go all your software savings. So why management would love to reduce the staggeringly high costs it's not worth the risk until an alternative is very proven. In many projects customers contractually require is to use a specific solution.
  - SirHumphrey 2y ago
    And even if the software doesn’t cost you in failed projects it can cost you in other ways. The old meme from 10 years ago about: “Linux being free if your time is free” is largely false for personal usage, but in the corporate environment somebody will have to provide support and with the open source software this is going to be you. People selling B2B software know that so they will usually price things in a way that it is just a bit cheaper to pay them rather then support and retrain staff.
- leoedin 2y ago
  I don't think it's simply "engineers hate open source". Most of the open source tools in the embedded space are just a bit crap. The reality is that good software needs many thousands of hours of development time. The embedded space is actually pretty small in development budget terms - so fewer engineers who might devote time - and also there's less overlap in skillset - electronic design engineers rarely have the software skills required to develop EDA software. Most of the incredibly well used robust open source packages are sponsored by large tech companies. The embedded space just hasn't had that kind of sponsorship.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    I suspect it's the ways in which they are a bit crap. All software is a bit crap one way or another. FreeCAD's UI is "a bit crap". The "workbench" metaphor is fine as a metaphor, but the specific way the workbenches are put together in FreeCAD is oriented more towards the way the functionality is implemented than what the user wants to do with it. You have no choice but to understand technical implementation details. That's just one example, but that attitude to UI in FreeCAD is absolutely pervasive. I think that's a general problem in the space. The user interfaces in general aren't designed, they're an outgrowth of the direct implementation of the underlying functionality.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      Yes. You’ll have a hard time finding a full-time professional photographer that hasn’t tried Gimp, and an even harder time finding one that still uses it. That’s not even getting into graphic designers— Gimp’s typography tools are awful. Open source software that’s useable— more recent blender versions, Inkscape, Firefox, Signal— is the only stuff that’s caught on in large part because they deliberately enfranchise designers. As an experienced, art school trained designer with far more than enough full-time coding experience to implement my own designs, I still exclusively contribute code to FOSS projects as a developer. I’ve seen both sides of this and am perpetually dispirited by the dismissive, haughty, and frankly ignorant attitudes towards designers among many developers. FOSS interfaces are put together by and for people who a) have a working mental model of software functioning, so they reason about interfaces differently, b) know more about the code than the problem domain, c) are used to and pride themselves on learning complex systems based on a set of complex docs. Until changes, user-facing FOSS applications will be used by developers no matter how useful they would be to others.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. Probably because if you complain about bugs or problems in open-source software, a legion of trolls comes to tell you "erm, it's open source, you can just implement it yourself" no matter how skilled the user is at programming. Like, for example, the lead dev of Inkscape, who used to (not sure if he still does) go around on twitter looking up complaints about how slow Inkscape is on macOS and then complain about them being entitled. No wonder they don't want to use it, then, if it's considered rude to even expect the software to work.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    Yeah, this is a non-trivial effect. It affects FreeCAD too. Mostly contained to the forums, but if you ask a question it's wise to give people who actually know what they're talking about a couple of days to show up.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      I think part of it is also the user knowing that they have no right to express frustration when the product is free. That's actually a mental burden. In a sense, people buy software partly so they feel they have the right to complain when it has issues. And honestly I think that's pretty reasonable
      - regularfry 2y ago
        No, they do have the right to express frustration. What they don't have is the right to demand work from anyone else, but what tends to happen is that communities are on such a hair trigger for the latter that they reject the former even when the frustration is directly caused by a solvable problem.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        Well the thing is, if you buy a product you do have the right to demand work from someone else, and that's why people buy products
- typewithrhythm 2y ago
  If I have two solutions I don't expect to easily work, one is free and one comes with an expensive support contact, then I will weigh the cost of the support against the value of the whole project. Often the support is worth it, because I can have a conversation with someone early in the process. If I commit to open source then I either need to hire an expert (this does not get the same guarantee as a support contract) or live with much more uncertainty.
- hn492912 2y ago
  For non-SW engineers, like myself, software is a means, not an end, and FOSS or not FOSS is irrelevant. To get a EDA tool to a useable condition, and debugged to the point where it is reliable enough to actually use, is just a ton of work. As someone who wants to design circuits, why should I do that work? How will it help me design more circuits? I understand why beginners and casual users don't like them because the EDA tools do have a huge learning curve, but once you're there, they are very productive. For professional engineers the software license is not really a significant barrier. Compared to the cost of labor, materials and equipment it's basically a noop.
  - moooo99 2y ago
    > and FOSS or not FOSS is irrelevant. I don’t think this is universally applicable. I think you can differentiate software by how important it is. Some software is at the very core of your business. A CAD, a ECAD, some lab software or a video editing program. Realistically, if you cannot justify the expensive of that software for your business, you probably don’t have a business. Many of those apps require substantial R&D to get right, something you can only afford if you make real money by building it. But there are other supporting applications that are not as close to your value add as your core apps, but they can still sleep you over real bad if the vendor goes bust or raises prices into the sky. That may be a teams chat app, a mail client, a wiki software. Most of those apps are essentially the infrastructure of any business nowadays and are relatively solved problems. In this area OSS really shines and reduces a lot of the vendor risk.
  - goku12 2y ago
    None of the points you make is universally true. FOSS means that there is less of a chance of the rug being pulled from under you in the form of subscription services nobody asked for. This has been a repeated annoyance with one certain company which did that recently for an ECAD tool and an MCAD tool. And, there are enough motivated people who do a ton of work to make FOSS software reliable enough. In fact, MCAD is an exception in that area. We have world class FOSS operating systems, 3D animations systems and development tools in an endless list. Even Blender, which was not very popular a decade ago, suddenly gained recognition. FOSS ECAD is on the way and it will happen some day for FOSS MCAD too. Finally the license cost. The cost of proprietary software - especially engineering and scientific software is exorbitant in countries with better purchase power parity. Much less would happen in those sectors in such places if it weren't for the large repository of FOSS software available to them.
- rleigh 2y ago
  It's because these tools are used to deliver high quality physical products on time and on budget with no scope or interest in messing around with software defects. These tools are treated like physical tools. It's worth paying for a high quality one which won't cause unexpected grief, by people who will provide immediate support because we pay them. I think if there were good quality open source equivalents they would be considered, but they pose a huge risk, possibly even an existential risk, if they derail our development plans unexpectedly. Paying a lot of money for seriously good quality tools reduces that risk dramatically. I've had a brief look at FreeCAD, and it's got a lot of potential. But when you compare it with SolidWorks, OnShape or SolidEdge, there's clearly a huge gap in usability and capability which needs closing before a lot of people will be able to consider it seriously. I'm sure it will eventually get there, like KiCAD did, but it will take many years and a lot of investment to get the usability, polish and featureset up to parity. It looks like Ondsel did a really good job to make some progress along that path.
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    I agree although I feel like one could easily make the exact same comments regarding compilers. I can't quite pin down why there would be many free (for various values of free) industry standard compilers but not cad programs.
    - whyever 2y ago
      Open Source works best for building blocks of software, not for end products. Companies have incentives to share their libraries and tooling, not so much for the final product like a CAD program.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Because those compilers are mostly sponsored by OS companies to outsource their software development costs in part. Also notice that all compilers for scenarios where liability is actually imposed, like in physical goods, most compilers are closed source, proprietary, and certified.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
- Xelbair 2y ago
  >I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions The problem is that usually open source solutions are really, really rough around the edges from UX perspective - and it could be minor edge cases for programmer! - but for engineer they are a dealbreakers. Look at it from the engineer PoV - they could learn industry standard CAD solution that works, has relatively good(depending who you ask and which version they started with) UI/UX .. and it's something they employer pays for. I worked with civil engineers that tried multiple different 2D CAD software packages and frankly, all of them hate Autodesk as a company, but they still did pick AutoCAD. They did have different preferences for specific AutoCAD version though. Honestly the core problem is that there's no pressure from clients on open source software to have a good UX, because there are no clients - just users and developers.
  - robinsonb5 2y ago
    The other problem is that sometimes from the perspective of an experienced user, "good UX" means "works exactly like the piece of software I've been using on a daily basis for the last 15 years." Even if a brand new UI is objectively better, to someone who's invested thousands of hours in becoming fluent, fast and efficient with an existing UI (however quirky or obtuse it might be) the new UI will be an impediment to productivity.
    - Xelbair 2y ago
      Sure, but that's not unique to open source software. it is a form of soft vendor lock in.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. Well if you're dealing with projects worth 7 figures (or more), it absolutely makes sense to go for a commercial project with SLAs on support. Last thing you want is to hit some showstopper bug, holding up people who earn 4-digit daily compensation, and been told to "figure stuff out yourself". If you as the author of a FOSS project that isn't a household name already for historical reasons (like, say, OpenSSL or cURL) and you want it being used by anyone else than hobbyists and universities, you won't get around establishing some sort of corporate infrastructure to sell support contracts.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  I’m a software guy. I love FOSS. Much of the tooling that I use is FOSS, and oftentimes the software is as good if not better than the proprietary equivalent. Until very recently, this was not the case in hardware world. In many cases it’s still not the case. You will meet all sorts of purists here that will tell you FreeCAD is good enough, for instance. Well, I tried using FreeCAD to build a hardware product. And eventually switched to proprietary software because FreeCAD could not satisfy my use case. I made a genuine effort to use the FOSS variant, but it was not usable for me. I’m more inclined to listen in hardware when someone says the FOSS tools are not good enough after that experience.
  - arlcode 2y ago
    FreeCAD moved from "barely usable for hobby projects" to "yeah maybe if I'm really inclined to try it on a very a simple professional project". At least that's what my engineering colleague told me recently. Which is a massive improvement and the result of many hours of fixing "boring" bugs, improving UX and all the other chores nobody wants to do. But for most commercial work it's not yet there.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- linsomniac 2y ago
  I'm a hobbyist and over the last month have been improving my 3D modeling chops. Because it's a hobby, the cost of the tools hasn't been an issue. I started with Ondsel, and it looks like a really good tool. I went through a couple of hours of a tutorial, and it looked pretty good. But then a friend reminded me of the Fusion 360 hobbyist plans, and I decided to give it a try, just to see. It blew my socks off! It's just a lot more refined. The first 12 minute tutorial took me further than I'd gone in the ~2 hours I did with Ondsel. FreeCAD is an amazing piece of software to be available for free. But in the end Fusion just operated a little more smoothly in lots of little ways. I have really limited time to do 3D modeling, so it's pretty valuable to me to get more done quickly. One temporary thing that's making FreeCAD a bit hard to get started with is that there's not much content out there for learning 1.0, and sifting through out of date content to find it took some work. That'll improve as time goes on.
- mft_ 2y ago
  I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I'd frame it as: people who want to get stuff done and who can't or don't want to have to fight or troubleshoot their software or the system it runs on will often have to choose non-open-source options. Some examples, from my perspective of being an enthusiastic and reasonably tech-savvy hobbyist: * Linux is almost always a huge pain to get running well. In contrast, MacOS almost always just works, and while Windows can be a bit more janky, it very rarely needs countless hours spent on e.g. Ubuntu forums or Stackoverflow trying random fixes until one does (or doesn't) work. Of course there are reasons for this, but it is true. (Will next year be the year of Linux on the desktop?) * Python is something I fundamentally love and use frequently, but I'm not the first to notice the terrible UX when it comes to managing different versions of Python itself, and its packages. Note that virtually every Python-based project on Gibhub (which is lots, thanks to ML) comes with a different set of instructions to get it running, usually based on a different distribution or package manager, thanks to an n+1 problem-solving approach [0] from the Python community. You can often run into huge issues simply installing a single popular package (looking at you, OpenCV). * FreeCAD... I'm an enthusiastic mid-level CADder, and have used several different commercial packages without a problem. FreeCAD is just awful currently - fundamental issues/incompatibilities betewen the different modules within the base system, a terrible ugly UI, an unncecssarily steep learning curve (even for someone well-versed in CAD). And of course the answers to (some of) these problems are suited to the limux hacker - "oh just install so-and-so's fork instead". Really? And you're surprised it doesn't take off with the hobbyist community? * Dearpygui.. a lovely, performant GUI for Python, but with such terrible documentation that for anything beyond the (sparse) examples, you have to resort to asking questions on Discord. (They are reponsive and friendly, though.) * GIMP - powerful... and just crappy to use. My basic premise is that most open-source products are designed and coded by hardcore programmers/Linux experts, who are great coders but either don't care about or don't have skills in optimising UI/UX/usability. Maybe it's the much-derided product managers (i.e. not hardcore programmers/Linux experts) who bring usability to a project. Maybe open source needs to work on attracting non-coders to its projects, and be open to listening to their criticism? [0] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - epcoa 2y ago
    > Python is something I fundamentally love and use frequently, but I'm not the first to notice the terrible UX when it comes to managing different versions of Python itself, and its packages. Python’s ecosystem looks like a trash fire and sits along nicely with JavaScript (they burn brightly in subtly different ways). Neither are concerned with adoption at this point though. > Maybe open source needs to work on attracting non-coders to its projects I think Python is proof that the economic realities are more nuanced than this.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  Almost all the tooling in FPGAs is proprietary because the vendors don't provide the information needed to develop open source tools around them. They'll also often obsfucate the bitstreams to make the reverse engineering process more difficult. Progress is being made but it is a slow and painstaking process.
- aseipp 2y ago
  In the case of FPGAs it doesn't really matter that the proprietary tools are buggy. What matters is the features and utility they have. Open-source FPGA design is still extremely, extremely far behind the proprietary alternatives in many dimensions (power support, integration tools, many aspects of simulation and test, general tools like floorplanners, and so on.) That isn't because people aren't trying either. It's just really hard and has limited talent pool. I've spent a lot of time at this point with both toolkits. I use the open source tooling extensively for my own designs. But you tell some grizzled RTL person there's no power analyzer or native SDC support or that UTM was only recently supported in some simulator, and they're going to laugh at you. They've been doing that stuff for 20 years. I know this because I've done it several times (though other people find particular things, like free RTL verification tools, much appreciated.) I think FOSS/software people paint some very rose-tinted picture in their mind where the mere availability of something for $0 would make it an obvious choice, even at only 10% of the functionality. But that's not how people see it in reality. Many people, including engineers, think of it the other way: if it's so good, why is it $0 and how do I know it will keep being developed? They've made their peace with the fact that the $5000 tool will exist practically for as long as they need, get the job done, and be supported.
kiba 2y ago
Perhaps you mean proprietary. Ondsel is after all a commercial project. The fact remains that proprietary software seem to be a license to print money, and with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. This is a uphill battle for open source software, but it seems that open source software tend to keep improving in the long run.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >with the ability to print money is the ability to entrench said software, such as heavy investment in software development. It seems like proprietary software has a big advantage when there's still lots of room for improvement, so that investment in further development pays off. However, in some cases, there's little room for real improvement, and the thing becomes a "solved problem" for the most part. At this point, the proprietary companies then start enshittifying the software (look at Photoshop, now a cloud-based program) to try to extract more money from users, and to keep users on the upgrade treadmill. Part of this is probably from the way corporate politics work: when you're a manager with a team in place, you need something to keep that team busy, to justify your team's continued employment to upper management, so when you run out of useful improvements to make, you invent less-than-useful "improvements" (e.g., ugly new UIs). This is where FOSS seems to be able to do well: it doesn't need to waste resources on useless improvements (we'll ignore GNOME for a moment as an exception), and can just focus on delivering the necessary functionality. Once that's done, it can just go into maintenance mode and people can move on to other projects. Until then, it can continue to improve and attract users to switch from the enshittifying proprietary stuff.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    GNOME, several reboots of the audio stack, XWindows versus Wayland,... FOSS only does well when it isn't the main source of income for contributors.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Wayland has its issues to be sure, but the X Window System was no longer suitable for modern systems; the justification for replacing it was quite sound. GNOME I'll heartily agree on. But I've never liked GNOME myself (v1 seemed OK though) and have always criticized that project. I've always been a KDE fan, though admittedly they've had some similar problems and have handled some major changes rather poorly (esp. 4.0). Really, the desktop environments are one place where FOSS hasn't really done that well, frequently re-inventing the wheel for questionable reasons, or adopting questionable new design philosophies. At least there's a fair amount of competition in the space, so if one project rubs you the wrong way, you can try another; this proliferation of competitors also shows just how much disagreement there is in the community on this particular matter. I really don't know enough about the audio stack changes; I can only guess that they found big problems with older solutions there which required major architectural changes, esp. for certain high-performance applications.
pabs3 2y ago
In which fields can one rely on open source?
- elashri 2y ago
  To name few that I am aware of. - Particle Physics - Astrophysics - Genomics - Quantum Chemistry - Molecular Chemistry - Robotics - Geospatial analysis - Epidemiology - Medical imaging
  - _dabs 2y ago
    Most of math also (with the exception if you Matlab for compatibility reason)
  - cozzyd 2y ago
    Even in particle/astrophysics we rely on proprietary FPGA Vendor tools, in proprietary electronics design tools (ok, kicad is seeing increasing adoption), and often proprietary embedded tools (depending on the microcontroller vendor). Not to mention proprietary graphics drivers (CUDA), CAD tools (Solidworks, Solidedge), mechanical or e&m simulation (comsol, Ansys, xfdtd, wipl-d, etc). A fair number of people use IDL or Matlab too and mathematica is pervasive among theorists. Probably nobody uses Origin anymore. We've gone backwards on documents since everybody is using overleaf now. It's true most of the software we develop, if made public, is open source.
    - elashri 2y ago
      Yes there are still pockets of proprietary tools but is of limited usage. Most of people in the field is not going to use them (because they don't work on these things). And most of these tools are tied to the hardware and there is increasing adoption like you said for kicad and FreeCAD. There are two exceptions which are theorists love for Mathematica and CUDA for GPU programming on NVIDIA GPUs. For CUDA, it is not bad as you don't pay per usage or don't have contacts, you do this because you purchased NVIDIA GPUs. Which is the best in the world for the use case we have in particle physics experiments. I have never seen someone in the HEP community or Astrophysics using Matlab. Regarding overleaf, it is open source and you can self-host the community edition for free or self-host professional instance and pay subscription.

arrobbiato 2y ago

Thanks, Ondsel - it was a worthy and welcome attempt. And you left FreeCAD much better off than when you found it. For that reason, Ondsel may be shutting down, but it is anything but a failure.

dangsux 2y ago

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schaefer 2y ago

Truly bummed about this one. I’d been learning CAD with Ondsel, and have printed off half-a-dozen of my models to help around the house. If this comment finds its way to the team, I just want to say thanks. The topo naming fix and the assembly workbench were enormous contributions to the community that will be with us always. But I really believed in Ondsel’s vision for an online repo for 3d models.

EasyMark 2y ago
These are the kinds of projects I would love for philanthropic billionaires to get behind rather than political garbage. It’s something that can serve everyone everywhere
prokoudine 2y ago
It did find its way to the team, thank you :)

rcarmo 2y ago

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Tomte 2y ago
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- aurareturn 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome on HN so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't be rude. It's enough to politely explain that if a story hasn't had significant attention yet, reposts aren't treated as dupes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

mmmore 2y ago

It's sad that this is failing, and sadder still that I, an occasional CAD user, never heard of it even though I really wanted something like this (at least in theory).

IshKebab 2y ago

Unfortunate but extremely predictable. The commercial market for CAD cares about CAD that actually works, not free software ideals. FreeCAD is simply not in the same league as commercial CAD like Solidworks, NX, Creo, etc. IMO it's not even in the same league as SolveSpace, at least last time I used it (which was admittedly some years ago).

LordHeini 2y ago
It was absolutely worth a try. Blender suffered the same sort of issues as FreeCAD does, but managed to get out of the slump. It is often important to have a main player enforcing proper, unified UI/UX and fix the many small problems and bugs which drive users away. Sadly it is usually an issue with long running and highly complex open source software that it gets really fragmented. You see that in every function having its own button or workspace, inconsistent naming, functions which do the same but slightly different and things working differently depending on some context where they really should not. Thanks to the people from Ondsel it felt like FreeCad would be on a similar route to Blender. It was way more user friendly thankfully there has been major back porting. So there has been a lot of progress especially with the upcoming 1.0. You should give one of the Release Candidates a try. I use it for my 3D printing projects and it works pretty well.
phoronixrly 2y ago
The parent comment rephrased: 'oh it was a useless effort like any other effort to push open source in CAD'. (Not true btw, Blender is an institution in non-parametric design, the niche for open-source is just for parametric CAD). How is open source supposed to break through to this 'market' as you call it? Should we just give up instead?
- Double_a_92 2y ago
  I think the main sentiment was more about FreeCAD being extremely bad to use, and not against Ondsel's efforts to make it better. I just tried installing the new RC of FreeCAD, and it's still a horrible horrible unusable mess (despite all the improvements of Ondsel). Anyone trying is probably better off starting from scratch on the GUI, and only extracting the algorithmic bits from FreeCad.

phoronixrly 2y ago

I've just started using FreeCAD after bouncing around Solidworks, Onshape and Fusion360. The changes in 1.0 are more than welcome! Thank you for your contributions!

daghamm 2y ago
I learned freecad some years but never really liked it. Fast forward to version 1.0, it feels like a huge improvement and I think k I will try to use it again for smaller projects. The biggest improvement IMO was the partial sketch thing, which I can't even find among the release notes... https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 I was sceptic first, but 1.0 turned out had some major improveme
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  It is! It is totally usable for my hobby projects that I overkilled with Fusion360. Btw Fusion 360 crashes as often as FreeCAD 1.0 for me, despite its holier-than-thou maker.

loufe 2y ago

Every time I have a personal project and want to make a simple CAD drawing of a building or a simple model, as I would using AutoCAD at work, I go through the same song and dance. I look around at the options online, my jaw hangs open at the cost of any commercial CAD subscription/licence, then I get frustrated by a glaring lack of functionality or useability while trying some free/open source solution, and resort to a 30 day trial or MSPaint/paper. Some of the comments already mention how blender's existence is predicated upon it filling a niche in certain senses, instead of trying to achieve feature parity with an entrenched giant. That makes sense, and it's unfortunate, as this space could use an open source option with Blender's polish. In my own industry, mining, I am certain some commercial interests would happily make their product an extension/plugin for a polished FreeCAD (or other), were it at that point.

jitl 2y ago
Have you tried OnShape? It’s not open source but it is totally free for hobby use.
- encom 2y ago
  I hate it because it's a website. I want actual software. Free software ideally.
  - klysm 2y ago
    I understand the gripes with web-based platforms, but its performance is pretty impressive. They've done a good job with it.
    - inhumantsar 2y ago
      same here. if I want to slap together a quick model or sketch, it takes seconds in onshape vs minutes in f360. I've even loaded projects into my phone's browser while out to view sketches or assemblies.
KeplerBoy 2y ago

ponow 2y ago

Ignoring the entertainment industry, if there were no copyright for software applications beyond that which can be achieved by contract, what would the CAD software landscape be like? Clearly it would exist, but with a completely different revenue model. Predictions?

pbronez 2y ago

Real bummer. I’m keeping an eye on Zoo (fka KittyCAD) for my personal CAD work https://zoo.dev/ https://zoo.dev/

Double_a_92 2y ago
Am I missing something, or is that just a fancy openSCAD?
- pbronez 2y ago
  Zoo and openSCAD both create 3D objects using code in a domain specific language. Other than that, very different. OpenSCAD has limited ambitions; Zoo wants to kill Autodesk. Zoo is building a commercial grade product suite from first principles. They're writing a new geometry kernel and optimizing it for GPUs. They wrote a new domain specific language for CAD [0]. They're running the kernel on the cloud behind an API, streaming video to the client and billing by the server-minute. Ideally that will deliver great performance and keep the tool accessible to casual users. The really exciting thing, for me anyway, is they want to unify design-by-code, design-by-mouse, and design-by-ai. Start with a plain language description of what you want. Get a fully parametric object on your screen. Click around making adjustments. Pull up the code and make precise changes. Keep a complete changelog in git. Anyway, much more detail here: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomo... [0] https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-samples https://github.com/KittyCAD/kcl-samples
  - Double_a_92 2y ago
    > They're running the kernel on the cloud behind an API, streaming video to the client and billing by the server-minute. That sounds absolutely horrible though. There is no chance of it being truly free because the servers cost money. You are fully locked-in in that system. It won't work offline. You can't use it for secret projects... Unless it's intended for companies to run the API on their own servers?

lazulicurio 2y ago

This is a huge shame. Ondsel brought much-needed focus to the freecad development process. I hope that with them gone the project doesn't revert to the mindset of "everyone gets their own fiefdom (workbench) to manage" that's resulted in instabilities and fractured user experience in the past.

ddtaylor 2y ago

I have a project that turns Blender into something like Tinkercad. I want help with some Blender gurus though. I made it for my wife because once her designs get too complex Tinkercad servers crash and stop exporting.

WillAdams 2y ago

For a long while, I was trying to track CAD applications for a wiki for a then opensource CNC: https://web.archive.org/web/20211126210706/https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/CAD https://web.archive.org/web/20211126210706/https://wiki.shap... (trying to get that back into shape at: https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki/cad https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki/cad ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D) and FreeCAD seemed simultaneously the most ambitious, and the most promising --- hopefully v1.0 will pay off on that, and result in a tool which can be used widely --- but it will eventually need some sort of commercial support. Ondsel seemed a good fit for that, and it's unfortunate that they didn't make it. Notable other options include: - Solvespace --- a venerable and simple tool, it is barebones to the extent that many folks won't be able to accept it - Dune 3D --- this is an incredibly elegant and usable tool, which I hope FreeCAD will look to in terms of UI, previously discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068 - BRL-CAD --- _the_ venerable choice, but the interface is so old school and programming-like, most folks won't even consider it - OpenSCAD --- 3D modeling for programmers --- the great thing about it is, anything which one can describe mathematically can be modeled --- the awful thing about it is, what one can model is limited by one's mathematical knowledge. A further concern is that DXFs from it are just polylines, no arcs --- I've been working to address that using OpenPythonSCAD at: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview LibreCAD is workable for 2D, though I only use it for file conversion. The other notable options are OnShape (free for public designs), Alibre (quite affordable), Solidworks for Makers (for values which include non-commercial usage watermarking).

pbronez 2y ago
OpenSCAD is my go-to. It's self-contained and AI coding tools know the syntax well enough to help you move fast. Unfortunately I keep hitting a complexity ceiling. If it doesn't like how I'm describing something, it crashes. I have to load an older version of my .scad and try a new approach. This usually happens 70% of the way into a complex project, which is quite discouraging. The Python ecosystem has CadQuery[0] and a few other tools built around the Open Cascade kernel[1] which is quite good in my limited experience. CadQuery is positioned as an OpenSCAD alternative [2], and I really want it to be. Unfortunately the user experience isn't there yet. Making an object with CadQuery is writing a Python program. Which means you need a Python environment and dev setup. CQ-editor [3] is nice, but needs a Python environment first. I think CadQuery would be much more viable OpenSCAD alternative if it was packaged into a standalone CQ-editor application and published via homebrew, etc. I'm also interest in Zoo [4](fka KittyCAD). They're trying to create a modelling tool that combines model-by-code and model-by-mouse. With some AI layered on top. They have an interesting architecture where they stream geometry to your local device from the cloud. Should be great for performance, but ties you to the cloud. [0] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology [2] https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cadquery-instead-of-openscad https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad... [3] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor [4] https://zoo.dev/ https://zoo.dev/