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FreeCAD 1.0 finally dropped! (www.freecad.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 102 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Apparently Ondsel recently announced they’re shutting down, partially due to this release. A lot of what Ondsel added to the FreeCAD experience is just merged into FreeCAD now. Sad to see it but at least all their work wasn’t for nothing.

https://ondsel.com/blog/goodbye/

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I had mixed feelings about the whole Ondsel thing. And, please correct me if I'm wrong.

    Most of the significant features in 1.0, that supposedly came from Ondsel, are things that I've been using for perhaps 3 years now, with a fairly well known branch of FreeCAD called Linkstage3 by a user that goes by RealThunder.

    I don't know how much he was involved in Ondsel, or the merging of those features into FreeCAD, but it sure looked like a whole lot of great work wasn't credited to mind boggling amount of work by one person.

    I still use the Linkstage3 branch, because it has a lot more features still, than what was present in the 1.0 pre-release i tried some months ago. Maybe things have changed since then.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Ondsel's goal was to make money by selling cloud services for CAD users. They were probably bound to fail in that endeavor-- and they did. Still, it was worth a shot. But their biggest contribution to FreeCAD was being the adult in the room and getting all the different groups to agree on how to move forward to solve the biggest problem, the TNP issue that FreeCAD had from the start and couldn't be arsed to fix. Ondsel's lasting contribution is the Assembly workbench that is now be the default Assembly workbench for FreeCAD. And it's a lot better than the other 3 hacked solutions.

    realthunder was involved in folding his TPN solution into this 1.0 release. Though my understanding is that it's different than his implementation. He is now back to his fork and is supposedly cleaning up his code to work better with the mainline branch of FreeCAD to make his code easier to insert.

    Personally, I would move to either the stable 1.0 release now or, I you are crazy like me, the 1.1 weekly releases-- brought to you on github every Tuesday and Saturday for your alpha enjoyment of the bleeding edge.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Me too. Ondsel wouldn't have been possible without the massive amount of work that previously happened on FreeCAD.

    If you want to be supporting FOSS, this is how you do it.

    It's also likely, consider the first paragraph of their goodbye, that it has more to do with competing in a commercial CAD space (where engineers are trained on specific software different from FreeCAD in school) than anything else.

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