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!

44 comments

I think FreeCad is a great tool once you overcame the initial issues. I think it's not as user friendly as commercial tools but I think that's a general issue with smaller projects that don't have billions of funding.
If you want to support a FOSS alternative, you could engage to make FreeCad better. Make tutorials, report bugs, update the documentation, help with translations, help users on the cmvarious forums and platforms or simply throw in a few bugs for the developers. :)
- TBH I don't like FreeCAD - I fell like it's like recommending Gimp as a serious alternative to Photoshop. With enough effort and deep knowledge you can almost achieve similar results but you have to invest multiple times as much time. The saving in licencing cost is very quickly eastern up by the increased labour cost.
  There is an alternative that has come a long way IMHO, though: BlenderBIM. They are still not quite as good as ArchiCAD and such but it runs natively on Linux and is very neat so far.
  
  It really depends on your needs. 3D printing community is very satisfied with FreeCAD, and GIMP is great for my needs when I need to find a way to increase visibility of some features in drone images and than make python script to repet it hundreds of times. No way I could do it in in PS. Making it run under wine already takes too much time.
  And it is not only about money for license but about freedom.
  I always see coments like this, and while I appreciate sharing of experience it is just being boring. At least add something specific and don't be a bot.
  
  Gimp is intuitive to me. I grew up on RISC OS, not Windows, and only later learned Photoshop. Switching was easy for me, and that was before I got into FOSS. It was just free and legal.
  I've seen lots of people from a Windows only background struggle with it. I agree it's not like a normal Windows app. Maybe single window mode helps, but I'm not in a place to judge.
  
  GIMP is a serious alternative to Photoshop. Wtf is your problem?

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!
- 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

Having used autocad for nearly 40 years, I will say they stick it to their customers pretty fiercely. I still use 2010 with 3rd party software to get it to run on win10 at home. I do a lot of solid models and assemblies as well as technical 2D drawings and renderings.
FreeCAD is impressive, but it lacks an easy to use interface. NanoCAD and LibreCAD are not open source but are free and are both better 2D alternatives.
Edit: LibreCAD is open source.
- According to the LibreCAD website, it is open source.
  https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD
  
  Ahh, I was mistaken. Libre is open source.
- freecad is like gimp. devs with godcomplex ruin it for the rest of the world. i'd rather use krita, blender etc.
  
  I've found the FreeCAD community to be extremely helpful
- LibreCAD ... not open source
  FYI, "libre" means free, as in free speech:
  https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
- Isn't LibreCAD GPLv2?

Freecad is a real no go. Tried it and forced to do something with it. The amount of bugs. And really basic bugs makes using it for professional work a non starter. It basically is a collection of amateur software stitched together with no single part having reached maturity.
Freecad was built on top of a giant library called opencascade. Which is in part the reason why we can't have dynamic or real time modeling. Everything takes triple the interactions to make than in its commercial counterparts.
Add to that the lack of vision and the different fields of work of the contributors makes its development spread all over the place. Unlike blender, it doesn't seem like FreeCAD will achieve a breakthrough milestone.
- FreeCAD is doing a really substantial rewrite right now to completely revamp their topological naming system, which resolve a meaningful amount of pain points. It may bring it far enough to be a viable option.
  We'll see.
- Blender is the gold standard for what a runaway success of foss looks like. I'd love to see FreeCAD get there, but they'll need significant investment to do so.
- Have you tried Ondsel, a wrapped version of FreeCAD? I've found it a much easier move from F360 (only a few months ago) than FreeCAD itself, and am now modelling in it quite happily.
  I've still got some learning curve in front of me but, as with F360, once you master the basics, it's just a matter of learning a new trick or two for more complex models.
- I use it all the time, and it works great.
  The problem is that you were trained on autoCAD. I have no prior experience with CAD, so I don't expect it to be something it's not
  
  We probably don't use it for the same work. But I can do way way more work using other software than dancing around the interface clicking a bizzillion buttons before achieving anything. I need realtime dynamic editing and FreeCAD can't do that.

Fuck Autodesk. As a student, I have a Fusion licence but they wouldn't let me open and export my files because my PC is "no longer supported". Luckily, Altium's online CAD viewer allows exporting into KiCAD-friendly formats. A lot of editability and metadata got lost in the process but still good enough.

So what are you going to do about it?
Unless you contribute code or assist existing projects, nothing will change....

Media and Entertainment side sucks too. No hate on the actual devs, I know a few of the Maya devs personally and they are competent and want to help, but M+E is like 4% of Autodesk revenue so management doesn't really give a fuck. At least there's still Houdini and Blender is getting better as the time as well.