Reaction to the new QCAD Community Edition

cranky wrote

Well, after reading posts in this forum I now begin to understand the history of where LibreCAD came from. I see that it was forked a while ago and has developed into what it is now.

It's always good to know history :)

cranky wrote

I also understand the good reasons for doing this to help keep it open source and so on, but I have to be completely honest here - I don't see the point of it anymore now that QCAD is again open source!

It depends how you look at it. For a long time QCad (v2 and v1 versions) didn't had any competition and thus wasn't maintained by ribbonsoft at all. Any patch to ribbonsoft was (i believe) ignored, but also patches should then contain some form of license. For example if you send in a patch to GPLv2 software, then ribbonsoft cannot put that patch in his commercial version, at least not without communicating this back to the person submitting the patch. This is for Ribbonsoft a huge overhead. So community couldn't even support QCad very well, except making a fork and make a GPLv2 only version, like LibreCAD.

cranky wrote

Sure I know that there is a small price to pay if you want to use a certain add-on - but hey we all need to earn a living.

If you are a person needing QCad and making money out of CAD drawings, there is no reason why not to pay for software.
However don't forget that there is a large user base using LibreCAD we don't hear of, may be because their internet connection doesn't exists or is bad, or simply don't have the money to pay for internet in the first place.  Or their banks simply won't have a option to connect your account to paypal or credit card (or it's just hard to do like here in Ecuador). How do I know? I got mails from a person supporting this in Africa. I believe LibreCAD and any open source software also must exists for these users that want to stay honest (don't pure software) and at the same time need software to do their job.

cranky wrote

Without using the add-ons the free version of QCAD is more than good enough for my needs and the option to contribute to the development is just a bonus, whats more the manual is there too.
I commend the efforts made to this project but...and I know this is just my opinion here - I don't see the point of re-inventing the wheel!

Well, the problem was like I said that if the community would drop support for LibreCAD we might end up in the same situation as before where QCad Open Source version wasn't supported by Ribbonsoft anymore and we again end up with ageing software because of the lack of competition.

Just me 2 cents.

R. van Twisk wrote

Well, the problem was like I said that if the community would drop support for LibreCAD we might end up in the same situation as before where QCad Open Source version wasn't supported by Ribbonsoft anymore and we again end up with ageing software because of the lack of competition.

Just for the sake of correctness: There is no longer an older "Open Source Version" and a recent "Commercial Version" of QCAD (since version 3.1, June 2013).

There is only one version of QCAD which is free, open source software, distributed under the GPLv3 with optional exceptions. These optional exceptions allow us (or anyone else for that matter) to distribute commercial, proprietary plugins and script add-ons together with QCAD under their respective licenses. This is an optional extension to the freedom provided by the GPLv3. Again, as required by the GPLv3, these exceptions are optional.

QCAD Professional is nothing else than the one and only QCAD open source software distributed under GPLv3, bundled with commercial, proprietary plugins and add-ons for DWG support and some advanced CAD tools.

Whenever QCAD Professional version X.Y is released, you can at the same time download QCAD X.Y source code under GPLv3 with or without exceptions at your choice or you can simply download the pre-compiled packages from our web site (for free without registration) and remove the proprietary plugins with a few mouse clicks. This latter option leaves you with the latest version of QCAD, completely open source and free, no strings attached.

Complete overview of licenses involved in QCAD and underlying libraries:
https://github.com/qcad/qcad/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

GPLv3:
https://github.com/qcad/qcad/blob/master/gpl-3.0.txt

Optional GPLv3 exceptions:
https://github.com/qcad/qcad/blob/master/gpl-3.0-exceptions.txt

Download of pre-compiled packages for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X:
http://qcad.org/en/qcad-downloads-trial

Andrew Mustun

We want to provide a different choice. As I always want to achieve, instead of doing CAD, pay attention to interesting 2D geometry also. For past months, I have been very busy with other stuff, but I plan to devote more time on LibreCAD, and hopefully, other interested developers will be interested in LibreCAD also.

LibreCAD will stay free software, with so much code contributed by the community.

I also want LibreCAD on mobile platforms, where people won't be asking about right click //kidding

Andrew,
if you want community to accept qcad, make it easier to contribute. As a translator I find it difficult to translate qcad. Is there a translation infrastructure? Where do I get source files? Even if I translate it, where should I send them? http://www.qcad.org/en/contribute page gives only very general direction and I am not even sure qcad accepts outside translation contributions (or any code contributions for that matter).

And since qcad is not available in my native language, I find it difficult to recommend it to my students and librecad is clearly a better option.

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Rūdolfs Mazurs

Rūdolfs, thanks for your feedback. Yes, contributions are of course most welcome for QCAD. There are several script tools and also translations included that were contributed by our community.

We use github.com/qcad/qcad to host the code repository. From github.com, you can clone the code and also issue push requests to have your code / translations / documentations pushed into the main branch.

I realize that there are better / easier ways to work for translators and I'm working with my provider to set up a translation server hopefully in the coming weeks.

Andrew