Skip to main content

One post tagged with "bugs"

View All Tags

· 3 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

There’s a valid question: how can FOSS CAD programs possibly compete with proprietary offerings? The answer is the community. Commercial CAD vendors need to pay for everything, but FreeCAD has an army of passionate volunteers and contributors. Grants for developers and Ondsel’s involvement are rather recent happenings. Mostly, the community has been managing the project for over 20 years on a shoestring budget or no budget at all — that is rather impressive.

Ondsel ES and FreeCAD have been developing a kind of symbiotic relationship. We build on FreeCAD, so we rely on it being great, but FreeCAD also benefits from new features and improvements we are bringing. However the upstream project is also larger than any group of developers: literally, everyone can help improve it, including non-programmers.