Comment by WillAdams
21 hours ago
For folks who are curious, the product in question here is physical objects and Onshape is a CAD program.
Their licensing kerfuffle was a bit more subdued than Autdesk's on-going slow motion crash (maybe AD has finally come to a rest) --- as noted elsethread, all documents on a free account are public.
The opensource alternatives are a wide-ranging lot:
- BRL CAD --- intensely old-school, it is one of the oldest opensource codebases
- FreeCAD --- exactly what it says on the tin, the recent fixes and UI updates have put it back on the radar for a lot of folks
- Solvespace --- small/light-weight and nimble (a single downloadable executable on Windows last I checked) it has a UI which I never found comfortable
- Dune 3D --- the new kid on the block, it has a remarkably polished UI (it's the only interactive CAD program whose tutorial I made it through more-or-less successfully) --- it's had a number of previous discussions here:
https://pythonscad.org/ and so forth).
I recently had to choose a CAD software and went for freeCAD. I wanted something local without subscriptions. It's ugly and relatively unstable but I'm not dropping $50-$150 a month nor learning how to use an online tool that can be unplugged at any moment
Dune 3D seems quite attractive/contemporary, and I believe more stable --- would it be something you would want to try?
I'm open to other things, I just stumbled on freeCAD first and after the few initial hours of pain I'm now able to produce most of what I want