Looking to open source for CAD alternatives

The entire Open Source movement is truly a font of optimism. I have to admit that many of the core beliefs of the technological religion called Open Source are very attractive to me. I want to believe. Open Source preaches that independent volunteer developers can produce a higher quality product than paid commercial teams. Open Source believers are fiercely anti-corporate, and often anti-social. I can relate to that. Open Source proclaims that stuff should be free, as in no cost.

But you can’t confuse Open Source with Free. SketchUp is Free, but is not Open Source. Open source means anyone with the resources can take the source code for the application and develop it into something more complete, or finished or specialized or whatever they want. Of course who has the resources to develop a CAD program as a hobby, and then give away your hard work, which supposedly works better than the stuff people get paid to do.

Do I dare believe? That sounds more utopian than Soviet propaganda in 1937 Berkeley California. How can obsessed guys without jobs, lives or girlfriends live on twinkies and write great software that puts commercial rivals to shame?

First, lets look at some Open Source products that we all know about. What Open Source products do we run into every day? Well, Wikipedia is one of my favorites. I don’t know how they do it, but it happens. They have put those venerable traveling World Book / Encyclopedia Brittanica salesmen out of work. Anything that puts salesmen or lawyers out of work is a good thing. People are smart enough to make their own decisions, salesmen have nothing to add. Wikipedia has information on almost anything you want to know. You can do Open Source CAD research on Wikipedia and learn great stuff.

Firefox is another Open Source success story. Tons of people love it and have tossed IE in favor of something a little less crammed down their throats.

Of course there’s always OpenOffice, the one app that Linux evangelists always point to.\n\nAnd then Linux itself. Linux is the altar of all Open Source. The operating system for sticking it to “the man”. Of course it turns out that the most successul Linux distributions are backed by big corporate muscle, which kind of takes some of the wind out of your sails, like Jerry Falwell taking contributions from Hugh Hefner.

So if you weren’t familiar with Open Source, now you know a little more about it. The one thing you can be sure of is that after I write whatever I write here, and it really doesn’t matter what it is, some zealot will crash in and tell me how mistaken I am about Open Source, even if I quoted everything directly from their tracts. They always feel so misunderstood. They always tell me Open Source isn’t what I think it is. Why is that? How do they know what I think it is? If it’s not what I think it is, then what is it?

Anyway, Open Source and CAD. Can it fly? I’ve heard people say that SolidWorks “should” make their source code available to be developed freely by hobbyists and weekend warrior programmer geeks who work for even less than unemployed Punjab tele-marketers. This would obviously make the code a lot better. Obviously. I mean it just stands to reason, right?

Good luck finding much decent Open Source CAD software. If you search you may find AvoCADo, a pre-alpha sketch pad for lines and arcs, and simple shapes. Way simple. You may also find something called Cascade, which is cool, and downloadable, but in the end, it is a developers plaything, not a CAD tool like an end users would use (more like a free Parasolid kernel). There are countless free CAD tools, but not that many Open Source. They are all worth about what you pay for them.

Open Source CAD has far less chance to produce something useful than Linux has in making a real mainstream break. You want to believe, but there is nothing to believe in. The apostles come out of the woodwork, and who knows where they go to once they deliver their message of misunderstanding.

If you’re looking for a rebel’s Open Source CAD software to go along with your non-conformist attitude, there is nothing yet to disturb your peaceful slumber. Neither SolidWorks nor Autocad have anything to fear from the Open Source divinity.