Autodesk is a monopoly! We need FOSS for AutoCAD desperately

architecture.live Harassment, Threats, and Intimidation - Many Architects in India report Autodesk’s Aggressive Tactics - ArchiSHOTS - ArchitectureLive!

Despite its near-monopoly and widespread popularity, a growing number of architects from small, medium, and large firms across India are voicing concerns about the Autodesk's aggressive tactics and pricing model, threatening to tarnish its once-sterling reputation.

Harassment, Threats, and Intimidation - Many Architects in India report Autodesk’s Aggressive Tactics - ArchiSHOTS - ArchitectureLive!

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44 comments

What is wrong with an existing FreeCAD? It seemed to me that the project is very active
- It'll catch on at some point. KiCAD did. Blender did. Many other FOSS apps have!
  
  FreeCAD has already merged the solution for the infamous 'topological naming problem'. The 1.0 release may happen soon!
  
  It needs to be faster and more stable. Crashes and slowness are killer issues. Slowness is single core issue. You can see one core working it's ass off, but the other like 15, sitting doing nothing. Plus it freezes during that often because it's not async/multi-threaded enough. Crashes, well that's just bad, but in this case it's normally when even 48GB RAM isn't enough. Bloody curved geometry from external sources with massive messes. Needs more exchanging files methods that isn't mesh based. But also mesh rationalization tools are need too.
  
  Solid works does the same thing though. Not crashing but even opening a simple model takes ages in solid works and the vast majority of things are single threaded there.
  Whenever we screen share a part in solidworks, it is literally 5-10 minutes of the meeting taken up by waiting for it to complete visual operations, load things in, and assembly constrainy computing.
  And you pay a shit ton of money for solidworks. Freecad also has these problems, but it is surprisingly not extremely worse than some professional cad software outside of crashing. Topo naming problem, UI, and crashing was definitely the worst thing about it. Apparently 2 of those 3 are getting fixed now.
  
  What's the second problem after topo naming that's getting fixed?
  
  UI/UX is getting a serious overhaul also I guess
- Nothing, just some users with sore butts because they're trained on AutoCAD. We need more Unis to train students with FreeCAD, and this issue will go away.
  It sounds like the Swiss government is forcing all State funded engineers to use FOSS, so in curious if that means they'll all switch to FreeCAD
  
  FreeCad is just OK, but it doesn't do what pro CAD tools do. I say that as a person that truly believes in opensource, but has also tried all major CAD tools since 1991 onward. There is so much money behind a pro tool, that the freeCads of the world can't compete
- It is OK, it is just doesn't do what a highly established pro CAD tool does. if you are used to the pro tools you recognize what is missing and it makes the workflow frustrating and tedious. You can still accomplish your goal in freeCAD, just takes longer and changes don't auto cascade through to your GCode, etc

44 comments