Posted by R. van Twisk on Oct 26, 2013; 6:57pm
URL: https://forum.librecad.org/Reaction-to-the-new-QCAD-Community-Edition-tp5708149p5709076.html

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.