Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into subscriptions [video]

But in the CAD field, Autodesk is the clear winner here with no good alternatives, even you count in FreeCAD. It makes business sense for Autodesk to keep grabbing as much money as they could, so they can: 1) earn money, 2) add more features into their product to raise the bar higher. It's the same logic behind Adobe and maybe Microsoft, Apple, Google etc.

The good news is, at least you don't have to pay for Autodesk 3ds Max now since Blender. Maybe it could be more productive if we convert our hatreds towards greedy commercial software into supports (donate etc) towards free and opensource alternatives (FreeCAD etc in this case).

So maybe when next time someone wanted to say "fuck Autodesk", send $5 to FreeCAD instead (https://www.freecad.org/sponsor.php).

~~I know that LTT had such a license and made it a point to bring it up every time VMWare called them to turn it into a subscription.~~

I remembered wrong. :(

The structure of the firm dictates it’s future.

Industry is making things. Books, food, video games, computers, petrochemicals.

Business is getting money.

Business strangles industry to death all the time.

The only thing we can do about it is make things that can't possibly be monetized. This is relatively easy in software - but still hard. Linux succeeded, and nobody pays for Solaris. Git succeeded, and nobody pays for Bitkeeper. One day there will be an open source equivalent to Autodesk and nobody will make money selling Autodesk equivalents, but the world will be better off.

But the people who make these things won't be rewarded, because they won't be doing business. Indeed, in many cases they'll go straight to prison.

Looking back, it would have been more productive to develop proficiency in and give money/support to any underdog competitor.

I agree on the 10 editable limit being idiotic as an incentive. They also have a quick button to flip it on and off in the sidebar. Like in your 10 switches example if you can activate any switch from anywhere in the house.

I have for years used different flavors of Ubuntu and Arch, but must admit, I always had some issues, no matter the distro. Mind you, purely counting the problems, the amount was either comparable or slightly less than what I tended to encounter on Windows installs, but still, I get that adding any issues on top of less familiarity and lower software compatibility is a hard sell for the average person.

Then, I tried Fedora, more specifically Silverblue, for the first time in a while and was blown away. Everything worked. More to the point, I could not break the install even when actively trying to. Software was bleeding edge but stable, the kernel the most current version without issues, immutability prevents even the most idiotic mistake on the user's part, no update ever caused any issue. The concurrent rise of Proton and Bottles for Games made it even more appealing.

Then, something followed that would cement my reverence for Silverblue: At the time, I had recently gotten an AMD Renoir based laptop. Silverblue ran perfectly, GPU acceleration, sleep, connectivity, all out of the box as if the notebook had been designed for Fedora.

Still, I made a Windows install as a fallback. Unlike with Silverblue which, thanks to Kernel support for the GPU, needed no additional configuration, Windows of course required drivers from AMD. Upon installing them, I quickly noticed crashes, instability and resolution issues. Turned out, Windows update had overwritten the newest driver I had installed with an older, incompatible version. No problem, I thought, annoying and not something one should have to troubleshoot on a for-profit OS, but manageable. Used DDU to remove that, installed the current driver, again, overwritten by Windows Update. Repeated the process, this time manually blacklisting the specific update. Still, that got consistently and painfully reset every time there was an update.

I understand that not everyone believes in having full control over their system. I also understand that delivering drivers via Windows Update is a valuable tool for some people. But if those drivers are faulty, taking away any graphics acceleration and causing crashes and you take away my ability to address that issue by overwriting my changes, I have a hard time seeing my money well spent at Microsoft.

Since then, I have migrated away from Windows entirely. It helps that I prefer single player story driven experiences and rhythm games, both being well covered by Proton thanks to the general lack of AntiCheat.

Aside from my Fedora systems, I have a MBP, but Ventura has its pain points as well. Simply, nothing has ever been as rock solid as Fedora Silverblue and, as much as Red Hat is currently heading in the wrong direction[1], I have to give them credit for Silverblue and Fedora Workstation. Those continue to prove more stable than anything I have ever experienced with Windows, macOS or any other Linux distro, regardless of hardware.

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...

This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close.

For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation.

Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with.

And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts.

That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.

This is especially true nowadays, as Steam has gone a LONG way to make gaming viable in linux.

Honestly in this regard, Windows struggles to be a drop in replacement for Linux, not the other way around.

I want to love FreeCAD, but it is hard to work with for complex designs compared to other tools; topological naming has been an absolute nightmare, but I persevere, it's improving slowly. At least now I'm less likely to have to throw away hours/days of design because I got into a mess.

As a Linux user, my options are slim, so I keep learning FreeCAD, and SCAD, but I'm always a little jealous when I watch a YouTube tutorial of how to do something that takes relative ease in tool X, but is an order of magnitude more complex to do in FreeCAD.

FreeCAD getting a benefactor that can propel it ahead would be huge; donations are great, but my measly donation is barely going to cover the cost of a bug fix.

In these cases OSS tends to be way more competitive.

If you’re giving put your software for free reusing OSS components makes a lot more sense KHTML -> webkit -> blink

Yesterday, because embedded firmware development is pain writ large

Indeed -- it's actually used in the FreeCAD Assembly 3 workbench as a solver (I think that supports switchable/pluggable alternatives now though)

I guess one just works through the tutorials until you on your own.

Another reason why I recommend all 3D artists to learn Blender. Nobody can buy and then kill it off. I'm pretty sure Autodesk would love to do that if they could.

Datum planes are usually unnecessary; cluttering up a design with a plane per sketch is certainly the wrong way to go about it.

You can place each sketch with the same tools you place a datum plane -- by editing the attachment and attachment position. (You just can't do it at the point of creating the sketch in the same way as you can when creating a plane).

You can then use expressions in those positions, including e.g. the width/depth/length of other objects (using the length of another Pad would be one very common scenario). Or you can use values from a Spreadsheet.

And TNP won't always bite you anyway. It's possibly better to learn how to fix attachment issues than clutter up your design with datum planes.

Learning how to place sketches in arbitrary space is so core to FreeCAD that it's probably worth going through the pain on this.

Datum planes do have uses -- like when you want to attach large numbers of sketches to a single plane, or when you want to model some arbitrary plane without using physical geometry. They are also useful for e.g. cutting holes up to a face (because the plane can substitute for a face)

They are also helpful, I find, when I am using an LCS for some feature.

But quite often you see people trying to work around TNP with a datum plane, only to attach that plane to the same object that will have the TNP.

This tutorial on attachment may help you (it's a bit involved)

https://wiki.freecad.org/Basic_Attachment_Tutorial

But the various Mango Jelly videos about sketch attachments are well worth watching.

Sage Math and all of it component software succeeded in that. Thus, I don't think it's something impossible.

In cases where there can be "good enough" solutions that can be achieved with more modest resources and then grow after gaining some traction we have seen some success stories. But for a lot of professional software in specialised markets it's almost an all-or-nothing proposition and that defeats the incremental adoption that has been somewhat successful elsewhere. Even well-capitalised commercial competitors have failed to make dents in the market share of the established giants in some of these industries and the odds are stacked even more heavily against any FOSS effort building up from the grassroots.

Also the DRM on all of these professional apps extends to the files they produce if you open a file in vector works autocad or any other professional software that was created or edited on an illicit copy a warning would pop up saying that the file was created on an illegal version and many of them wouldn’t allow you to edit the file further and for those which do saving the file again on a copy with a legitimate license does not get rid of the message that file is tainted for good.

This pretty much prevents any real world use of illicit copies professionally.

I've also heard that they ignore stuff like music and movies on those PCs, because it's too much work to prove whether they are legal or not, and they cost peanuts compared to stuff like AutoCAD licences.

But with software - you only have to ask the accounting department for receipts.