3 posts tagged with "news"

When Autodesk changed their license for Fusion 360 in September of 2020 there was a collective scream from the user community. Hobbyists, YouTubers, and makers felt betrayed. Now, after more than two years, we can see the effect. Many of those people left Fusion and never looked back.

“ ‘I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.’ — Darth Vader

If that’s how you’re going to treat the hobbyists, then goodbye forever to Fusion 360.” — solarguy2003

Over two years ago Autodesk imposed a number of new limitations on its free non-commercial-use license for Fusion 360, primarily impacting hobbyist and casual users: project storage was limited, exports to a number of (critical) file types were no longer offered, and support for CAM was drastically cut back, among other restrictions. These changes felt like a slap in the face, with some members deleting their Fusion 360 accounts in protest (whether or not they were affected by the new limitations).

The proprietary bait and switch​

The changes to the license for Fusion 360 for Personal Use were a perfect illustration of the risk of making use of “free as in beer” software. Many users felt betrayed and frustrated at the new limitations:

“The file export limitations in particular are crippling. No .step? .dxf? No extensions??? I can't even buy stress simulation credits? … yikes.” — raynr on Hacker News

Some users were not surprised, saying it was inevitable that the company would seek to monetize more of their product, even suggesting that the Fusion 360 license had been overly generous to begin with. This take undermines the exchange of benefits that takes place between vendors of free software and the communities that spring up around it:

“Think of the tens of millions of man-hours that have been invested into forum posts helping users, developing plugins, courses, YouTube videos, and Makerspace workshops that could have instead gone into making open source tools like KiCAD, OpenSCAD, pycam, etc better.

"All that work done by hobbyists, for free, helping Autodesk dominate the market in low-end CAD/CAM software.” — sfdsfsdfdsf on Hackaday.com

While Autodesk maintained they were still committed to “democratizing design for everyone,” the community didn’t buy it, seeing it as a bid to squeeze money out of hobbyist users after riding their coattails to market domination. As one disappointed user commented:

“... you showed that you prefer to spend money to block existing features of your software instead of improving it with new paid features. That’s an indicator that you don’t care about the product itself anymore, but that you are just trying to extract the maximum money out of your current users instead.”— streakycobra on Hacker News

So where did disgruntled Fusion users go?​

Fusion users asked, “What can we use instead?” and the overwhelming sentiment was in favor of supporting free and open source projects that can’t be bought out or taken away.

As a longtime contributor to FreeCAD I was happy to see it suggested often. The effect can be seen clearly in FreeCAD’s GitHub star history: the count has more than tripled since September 2020.

Caption: You can see a dramatic 30% star growth after Autodesk’s controversial changes

The spike in followers for @FreeCADNews tells a story too:

And here’s the project’s growth in contributions:

In the 2+ years since Autodesk changed the Fusion 360 license, new communities around FreeCAD have sprung up on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook—all with over 3,000 members.

We know that one of the tradeoffs with FOSS is that sometimes you might need to roll up your sleeves and contribute (time or money) towards the features and fixes you want to see. It’s gratifying to see this growing community getting involved to continue developing FreeCAD into a viable Fusion alternative, without the bait-and-switch risk of proprietary solutions.

Where to from here?​

I’m now working full time on Ondsel, built on top of FreeCAD. While Ondsel’s product set is still being defined, my vision is to improve on the FreeCAD UI to make it more accessible for non-software engineers and build the collaborative features that small businesses and enterprises can benefit from—now with the resources of full-time development talent. With open core, the business model is to monetize features based on who will use them, with the core product remaining free and open to all. A strong core is integral to Ondsel’s success, as the core features are often an onramp for casual or hobby users who grow into businesses of their own and require different features as they scale. Having a solid and active open source ecosystem around it is vital to actually democratizing design for everyone. In the coming months I’ll be hiring engineers to help define this vision and build it with me, but in the meantime I would love to hear from you about what you’d like to see from FreeCAD and Ondsel in the future.

Things are changing​

On August 17, 2022 the FreeCAD community celebrated its 20th anniversary as an open source project. That was an important milestone … and it passed with hardly anyone noticing. There was another important development last year and it barely got any more attention, even though it was far more consequential.

I'm referring to the creation of the FPA: FreeCAD Project Association. The FPA is a legal entity whose mission is to advance and protect the FreeCAD project. Besides being able to receive donations and pay for services, the FPA has a formal membership and decision making structure and this matters.

FreeCAD is changing​

For many years the FreeCAD project operated as a loose confederacy of core developers. Decisions were made by consensus. Development moved forward when someone had an itch to scratch and the project philosophy was, "It's done when it's done." That kind of loose government served the project pretty well. Until it didn't.

As the number of developers grew and the codebase got larger, consensus was harder to reach. Some problems defied consensus altogether. Too often, it felt like nobody was steering the ship. Many people wanted to see a clearer roadmap. They wanted leadership to address those thorny issues. Without a roadmap it was too risky for commercial companies to build around FreeCAD. Without leadership, there was no confidence that big problems would be addressed and industrial users were unwilling to adopt FreeCAD for mission-critical use.

Introducing the FPA​

The FPA was launched with modest goals. The founders wanted to avoid a heavy-handed dictatorial style. They want to encourage the kind of collaboration and consensus that has made the project productive and fun for two decades. They also recognized that FreeCAD is maturing as a project and some formal structure is necessary. I was honored to be part of that process and deeply impressed with the wisdom and care that the founders took to balance these interests.

While the FPA is still finding its footing, it has already started taking steps that should have everyone excited.

First, the FPA has money and the willingness to fund development. With it, they can encourage focused effort in areas where organic interest hasn't emerged.

Even more importantly, the FPA is working to get developers together in the same room. Zoom, email, and issue trackers are the tools we live with and they work well for day-to-day operations. But there's nothing like face-to-face meetings for building trust, resolving conflict, and making long term plans. The ability to work face-to-face is one area where commercial development has a clear advantage over open source software. The FPA recognizes this and is taking steps to change it.

FreeCAD Day at FOSDEM​

The first ever 'FreeCAD Day' will be held prior to FOSDEM on February 2, 2023. The day will be organized as an unconference. People attending the event will propose and decide what to do on premises. There will be plenty of opportunities for side discussions.

FOSDEM brings together developers from hundreds of open source projects. It provides a fantastic opportunity to discuss collaboration opportunities with other projects, learn from their successes and from their mistakes, and meet like-minded folks.

Ondsel in the room​

The dream of building a commercial company around FreeCAD has been around for a long time. It's one way that developers could build not just a world-class CAD solution but their own careers. Now that Ondsel is finally launched as an open core company we are excited to partner with the FPA and the FreeCAD community at FreeCAD Day 1.0. We look forward to meeting, collaborating, dreaming, and building great things together.

Ondsel is Launched!

Technically, we started life at the beginning of January 2023. The last few weeks have had us busy with the logistics of launching; Getting a website up, activating our internal tools, and figuring out how we fit into the greater FreeCAD ecosystem. Those details are done so it's time to start talking about the opportunity we have.

The best place to start is OpenCoreVenture's official announcement post about Ondsel

In the coming weeks and months we'll use this blog to discuss where we're going and why we think it matters. You can follow us here or on Twitter or LinkedIn We're also building our team and looking for passionate and talented people.

Join Us!