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Re: Reaction to the new QCAD Community Edition

Posted by maqifrnswa on May 31, 2013; 11:54am
URL: https://forum.librecad.org/Reaction-to-the-new-QCAD-Community-Edition-tp5708149p5708153.html

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 8:09 PM, to-b [via LibreCAD]
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hello LibreCAD Team,
>
> a few days ago i read in this article
> (http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/qcad-community-edition-is-back-on-track)
> that a new version of QCAD Community Edition has been released.
>
> My question is whether you have already had a look at the code of this new
> release and maybe already have some plans to on how it could be beneficial
> to LibreCAD?

I think it's pretty cool that Andrew released a GPL version of QCAD 3
- i'll have to check it out. As for returning code, our patches are
GPL-2+ on top of his original code which is GPL-2, so the new GPL-3+
QCAD should be able to legally work with them [1]. LibreCAD,
obviously, can't take legally any of QCAD3s changes. I don't know if
the large-scale changes between the two code bases are prohibitively
difficult (at least with the time the current devs give to the
project). I think the biggest incompatibility (and what caused the
LibreCAD fork in the first place) is between the two development
models. Andrew has the responsibility of maintaining a commercial
product, he needs be overly cautious about large scale changes to the
code base that he in the end would be (financially) responsible to
maintain. He also has to keep QCAD CE and commercial somewhat on the
same code base, so accepting too many patches may lead to a fork
between QCAD CE and commercial. LibreCAD, on the other hand, has
historically been more open to community patches since there was no
other branch to be concerned about. In the past, patches and new
feature implementations languished on the QCAD forums for years
without comment, which lead to people trying it on their own forks. A
bunch of those forks and patches eventually merged with the work on a
CAM processor, which ended up as LibreCAD.

So before the two projects can merge together, we'd need to see how
"community" based the new QCAD CE is. But overall, it's a good thing
that it was released and I appreciate the work.

~Scott

[1] For completeness: when our GPL-2+ patches are applied to the GPL-2
code, the whole blob becomes GPL-2. We did this in case we ended up
totally rewriting everything it would be easier to transfer the whole
project to GPL-2+.