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Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it’s a wonderful tool. This post kind of upset me; it’s comparing totally different classes of program.

SolidWorks is subscription based, so your $50 buys access this year and probably you won’t want to use the model again next year, right?

OpenSCAD is free software, and that matters.

Hopefully readers know it’s decades behind and very rough to use. Your example of “superpower modern CAD” could have been a whole lot simpler... probably some simple 2D geometric construction would be enough to show a big gap.

SolidWorks is locked to Windows - out in the real world that might be 95% of the users but here it’s probably 50%.

To finish my defense of OpenSCAD: there’s a place and an upside to all-text source and coding parameterized with traditional variables that you can change in your editor and recompile just like any other code. No GUI is only 80% bad.

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First of all, I'm sorry I upset you! That was definitely not intended.

I'm not comparing the two, I want to show what's possible. I often see people finding OpenSCAD, getting comfortable with it because it's all code, and stopping there. But there's so much more to solid body modelling, it's not too complicated to learn, and a bit more advanced CAD really expands the range of physical objects we can create! This is why I chose those slightly more complex examples, I'm not trying to gotcha OpenSCAD, I tried to show why one might want to branch out, despite all the downsides (subscription, non-code source files, Windows*, etc) you mentioned.

Fwiw I dream of a good open source CAD that syncs code and GUI (like KittyCAD) but doesn't fall into the trap of "procedural" modelling like OpenSCAD or KittyCAD. The combination of sketches+constraints+3D operations+projections is perfectly representable as code, it's just much more work than raw CSG, requires a geometric kernel, and is more mind bending. Still, I hope we will get one some day.

*: it does run perfectly well in Parallels though, so between Mac and native Windows I suspect it's more like 80% here

You had me tricked into thinking Solidworks was $50/year.

I was about to impulse purchase a license and switch over from Fusion. That would be an incredibly attractive hobby license and would probably take a lot of money from Autodesk.

All I see is closer to $3000/year :(

It is, check out the sibling reply. Dassault's web 3DEXPERIENCE stuff is weird and unnecessary, but can be abstracted away behind a desktop shortcut.

Your $50 buys you nothing from Solidworks, expect to pay multiple thousands for that

SOLIDWORKS for Makers includes a full copy of SOLIDWORKS and costs $48/year https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...

For non-commercial use, files are watermarked and can’t be opened later in a commercial or academic licensed version

Sure, but I believe the majority of OpenSCAD users are fine with non-commercial use.

Generally people who preferred niche apps like OpenSCAD preferred not to be restricted in how they can use the app.

There's a difference between noncommercial and barely commercial; if you model something on OpenSCAD and sell a single copy for $5, is that commercial? Lawyers say yes. But no amount of productivity from Solidworks will make spending $3000/year be worthwhile here.

Solidworks says noncommercial but then gives you $2000 leeway on commercial use before you need a commercial license. I’m not sure how they square that with later saying the watermarked files you’ve created don’t work in a commercial version.

And it leaves you with an awkward gap where you sell $2000 and need a commercial license, but even ignoring income tax you don’t have enough revenue to afford that license.

If they were, they would probably be using TinkerCAD.

Imagine being new to the CAD landscape. There are so many technologies, and approaches. Different resources talk about the merits of the individual techs.

I would rather someone just flat-out tell me that OpenSCAD etc is ineffective for most projects compared to SolidWorks, Fusion etc; save the trouble of finding out the hard way. Your points are all great, but I don't mind the post you're replying to for this reason.

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