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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

I understand and agree with that. But to push back on the first sentence, I really don't think FreeCAD is acceptable. It's clunky, it's notorious for crashing on large models, its user interface is antiquated and really difficult to learn, and the code base is a monstrosity.

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Yeah, it did steal some of my time and gave me some gray hair too. However as I mentioned in another comment, PartCAD is not there to replace existing CAD tools. It’s there to extend the definition of computer aided design to include modularity and collaboration. The tools that we called CAD-tools will be called “CAD Design GUI” tools. For decades their marketing departments have successfully sold us the idea of those tools being the complete technology solution. Charging ridiculous amounts of money for any collaboration feature. And I don’t blame them. They are smart. But we, as a humanity, need to be even smarter. Smarter than agreeing to having no “merge/rebase” functionality in 2023.

This sub thread isn’t about PartCAD.

But on the topic of CAD/CAM systems, there IS value in having a single workflow tool from design to manufacture. Fusion 360 shows how beneficial it can be to have these different aspects of the workflow be seamlessly integrated.

There’s no justifiable reason to Balkanize all the CAD tools based on function. Users don’t want that.

Users who want to continue paying for the value of having all tools under one roof can continue doing so. From time to time they might not be opposed to the idea of importing a part or two from a public repository. At least for some simulation tests. They might also find value in using a proprietary private PartCAD repository when they migrate from one all-under-one-roof tool to another after being squeezed dry by the previous vendor.

No one really knows what all of the users want. The commercial tool vendors would tell us that all users want exactly what they sell. My subjective experience suggested a hypothesis that some users might want something different. After two days of PartCAD’s initial revision being out there, it would be fair to say that a lot of users want it. The demand and feedback exceeded all expectations.

So you agree there is value to be had?

Of course! There is more than one concept that has value. And each concept also has a price (or price range as there will always be multiple implementations of each concept, each implementation will deteriorate over time and so on and so forth). There will always be more than one class of consumers, more than one set of value/costs preferences. Otherwise we would only have one programming language, wouldn’t we? So acknowledging one concept has value doesn’t mean announcing that it is the only concept worth existing.

I only draw simple hobby projects from time to time and have given freecad a chance several times, but it can't even begin to keep up with commercial tools.

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