Merging of my Link branch

[Kunda1]

He most probably won't forever. Hopefully, he will keep interest until it is merged. Hopefully everything will match in the not so distant future. It is very difficult to maintain a single man band.

I feel the same. Developing FC is taking more and more of my time. It has stretched far beyond of my originally intention. It is hard to start something without finish it, but then it seems never ending, which is not surprising. Maybe I can make a career out of it, looking for some funding on this. Maybe the university I live nearby will be interested...

Honestly, I've always wondered why we don't have more universities interested in FreeCAD. I keep thinking of QGIS and their list of sponsors which also include servers, mirrors, continuous integration, grants...etc...

[fosselius]

Honestly, I've always wondered why we don't have more universities interested in FreeCAD. I keep thinking of QGIS and their list of sponsors which also include servers, mirrors, continuous integration, grants...etc...

I would guess that it mostly requires someone to actively search for and apply for founding. I would think it would be easier if you had a non profit found or something like "FreeCAD foundation", but that again requires some dedicated work and paperwork. It is harder to say "my name is X please give me money to work on opensource project Y", as its hard for the giving orginisationen to verify your claims and to follow up.

I the case of QGIS, take a look at: https://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/go ... ip-program
Any one up for maintaining founds and business relations? There are some serious discussions that needs to be had first. What to do with the money? Should you spend it on developers or on meetings/promotion? If you spend it on developers, who/when/why/how much? The last one is a seeding ground for even more and deeper conflicts within our community..

[abdullah]

He most probably won't forever. Hopefully, he will keep interest until it is merged. Hopefully everything will match in the not so distant future. It is very difficult to maintain a single man band.

I feel the same. Developing FC is taking more and more of my time. It has stretched far beyond of my originally intention. It is hard to start something without finish it, but then it seems never ending, which is not surprising. Maybe I can make a career out of it, looking for some funding on this. Maybe the university I live nearby will be interested...

From a financial point of view, I can perfectly understand you. As far as I know, this kind of collaborations manage to get public funding when there is a ( company + university ) interest, which run together for public funding, but the company also puts money in. This gives credibility to public funding. Other times it is just a private company paying the developer to boost the project development. I do not have a way to secure any of this for you, but maybe somebody is reading and can. I guess the CERN is not interested in funding another public project (they do fund KiCAD).

Regarding just FreeCAD, I can talk about the other side. When it is not only you, but you can leverage community help, it does not feel like the project is eating you up (or your time if you wish). You can manage your time and the rate of contribution, and focus on coding, if that is what you want to do (I understand from what I have seen so far, it is).

Of course it is up to you, and up to the opportunities you find in life (heartedly much luck there), whether to make a career on FC development, or you find another nice job and want to dedicate it part of your free time when your life allows and you want to, or none of the above (hopefully it is not this last one the one you choose).

In any case, splitting resources, community, FreeCAD versions (forks) is a good short-term development tool (short-term it is probably a must when it involves drastic paradigm changes), but it is generally not the best long-term scenario. It is my opinion that not even in the mid-term scenario, as it leads to inefficient use of resources (testing, bug reports, lack of integration, divergence, long PR review times) and an ever increasing risk that work has diverged so much that it is simply thrown down the sink. A one man band can then leverage the whole community by his charm and make a successful fork that becomes The Thing (tm), or silently vanish from the project.

Apart from the loss of work, which is indeed important, there is the human aspect of it. The person who sees its work going down the sink is not specially happy, losses motivation, is less active in the community, and generally is a person that could have been leveraged to the greatness of FC, but may be rendered "unrecoverable" by such events. For me the latter is much worse that the former. From a human point of view, because we are humans and I think we should show some empathy and humanity (you may well point out this is my particular wish, as 4000+ years of "humanity" have shown us we are rather prolific at enslaving and destroying than at showing humanity). But even merely from a pure egoistic productivity point of view, just project development, the potential lost is way higher than the lost work, as a happy high potential individual (like you) can long-term give more to the project than a "medium-term" single shot.

A third aspect that is not good for either part is "uncertainty". We all hate it. Unfortunately managing certainty in a FOSS project is the most difficult thing to do, because none of us knows if tomorrow we will have to work 60 hours a week in our "day job" because something is off, or we will need all our free-time to some other important matter. Here I hope that uncertainty is not driving you to depart from the project before your code is reviewed.

I do not have a magic wand to resolve this on my own, I would if I could.

I know you are smart and have a lot of potential. Your modifications to FreeCAD touch several aspects of it and go to the core of it. You understand what you are doing. Very little individuals have the courage and capabilities to undertake such development. I haven't seen many. For example, I haven't (I am mostly locked in my little Sketcher space, with some incursions into PartDesign). Additional to the size of the undertaking, is that you managed to do it successfully from a functionality point of view (I simply do not judge the underlying code, as I have not reviewed it). You have a nice group of followers of your work and they tend to love it. Moreover, you are not afraid to speak up to other developers, you are not overwhelmed by their abilities and you can defend your position from a technical point of view.

I know that all that is simply just not enough to guarantee a merge, but it makes me believe that you still have great chances to have your code merged, and FreeCAD still has a chance to retain you. I would really love to see v0.18 released and at the very beginning of the v0.19 cycle your work properly reviewed.

[easyw-fc]

I know you are smart and have a lot of potential. Your modifications to FreeCAD touch several aspects of it and go to the core of it. You understand what you are doing. Very little individuals have the courage and capabilities to undertake such development. I haven't seen many.

+1 I have incorporated some of @realthuder code of his fcad_pcb project into my StepUp WB, achieving great additional features.

I would really love to see v0.18 released and at the very beginning of the v0.19 cycle your work properly reviewed.

+1 again
I would suggest @realthunder to keep an eye on Py3 and Qt5 builds... this is the next upcoming release and been Py3 and Qt5 compatible will give your branch a step forward in merging...
Maurice

[dubstar-04]

Maybe I can make a career out of it, looking for some funding on this. Maybe the university I live nearby will be interested...

Can you set up a patreon or similar?

[Zerginator]

He has a donate button on his Github (also linked in signature)

[realthunder]

Can you set up a patreon or similar?

Yeah, I hear patreon is more friendly than paypal with this donation type of thing. Will try later. And thanks again for those who have donated.

[antoniovazquezblanco]

Honestly, I've always wondered why we don't have more universities interested in FreeCAD. I keep thinking of QGIS and their list of sponsors which also include servers, mirrors, continuous integration, grants...etc...

I am now a PhD candidate working to make a startup viable.

In my case the university has never shown interest because other solutions with money can get a great benefit from their tools being used in class through partnerships. If you have learnt to use X then, if you need to solve a problem you will suggest X to your boss. I have seen interest from teachers that are looking for a particular solution that they cannot find and try to get that feature through final degree projects and such (I work at an engineering school) without much success (I would say that partially due to lack of coding skills, partially due to lack of communication with you).

I can also see why industry is not looking at you. Freecad is missing some of the features that an engineering company needs. The startup I am working at cannot afford many of the solutions available and for this reason I am looking into FC but at the moment is not viable for us without the assembly functionality.

I believe FC is gaining quite a name. Maybe new marketing strategies can make the project run smoother. KiCad has risen a lot of money for their next release cycle by apealing to their users in order to push certain features. This is indeed a feature I would love to see merged as it makes a way into a feature that I consider fundamental but I also feel that donating whatever little money I can afford to @realthunder may not make a difference. I miss a "centralized" way to donate to FC so that whatever I donate could be steered into whatever the organization needs with a little bit more transparency. Also I think more people would be encouraged to donate small amounts of money if that would give them a way to steer a little bit the project (maybe donations that give rights to a poll of what features they desire the most).

Using release cycles as donation triggers is also important and also a way to get some feedback. After donating to this release cycle, if I see that something has been acomplished with my money I would surely donate again if I can afford that.

There are also events like GSoC that can help you get in touch with coders that are willing to collaborate with open source projects. Through events like that you may be able to get in touch with more universities and students that are willing to put work in at a cheap rate. Maybe tailormade tasks that can be used as final degree projects can work with apropriate mentoring instead of failing as I have seen. Furthermore offering small grants or prices for minor tasks that can be turned into a small project for a university student can be very rewarding and can be good publicity for you in universities.

My opinion is that in general people is very lazy and know little about open source communities so unless the proper communication channels are in place interest is not going to be shown from universities, students and companies.

Sorry for the long offtopic post. I just want to show support and try to express ideas that may be useful for someone here. What you've got going here is awesome and I will try to give as much support as I can although I do not yet use Freecad.

Keep it up @realthunder and thanks to everyone.

[wsteffe]

The startup I am working at cannot afford many of the solutions available and for this reason I am looking into FC but at the moment is not viable for us without the assembly functionality.

Have you tried with the realthunder version of FreeCAD (which provides a working assembly module) ?

[antoniovazquezblanco]

The startup I am working at cannot afford many of the solutions available and for this reason I am looking into FC but at the moment is not viable for us without the assembly functionality.

Have you tried with the realthunder version of FreeCAD (which provides a working assembly module) ?

That is one of the reasons I am peaking the forums this week. I am evaluating wether this is viable or not. For the time being it seems that realthunder's solution is not mature enough and it is not clear whether his work is going to become part of the official project. I wouldn't like to spend hours in a model that will lack support in the not so distant future (What do I do if after 100h of work realthunder stops working on his solution and his work is not merged finally). I need something a little bit more stable, an effort that is a little bit more coordinated with the core developers of FC.

I hope that the efforts to create a viable assembly module land soon in the core of FC. That may give more confidence to people like me to invest in a single assembly solution that works better in the long term without fear of loosing support.

As I expressed in another post, although this is not viable for me at the moment I want to express my gratitude through a donation and support that I will make as soon as I find the most suitable way for my usecase although it will not be outstanding due to my limitations at the moment.

Thanks everyone!