In memoriam: Roland Frank (r-frank) 1970-2017

[thschrader]

I have repeatedly deleted spam from this topic. It's absolutely tasteless. Would have liked to use one, but none of the existing emojis can reflect this.

Pinned to the top, it's going to, unfortunately, be a target for spammers (for whom I hope there is a special place in hell). Thank you for what you do to keep this place for us to remember Roland beautiful. I think I speak for all of us when I say we appreciate your efforts.

It is!
at chrisb: Don't get discouraged

[geit_de]

I just learned about him today.

Our way crossed before as he showed me how to use FreeCAD in his videos.

Very sad.

[onesz]

Respect what he did in life, mostly stays forever...

[chrisb]

Roland died one year ago. His great tutorials are still helping to learn FreeCAD, even if they use the version which was named after him, FreeCAD 0.17 Roland.

[erturne]

Hello, I am brand new to FreeCAD and am finding Roland's tutorial videos extremely helpful. I was saddened to learn that he had passed away.

Regarding efforts to prevent the loss of his videos, I have archived a copy of them on my own NAS which I make regular offsite backups of. If YouTube ever removes his videos, please contact me and I will work with the community to figure out what we should do with them.

[vocx]

... I will work with the community to figure out what we should do with them.

Unfortunately, Roland's videos are made with v0.16 and older.

FreeCAD received important updates in v0.17 so a lot of his work is now obsolete. This doesn't mean the videos are completely useless, but new users really need to work with newer versions, post v0.16, in order to understand the current workflow. New users using Roland's videos often get confused because the interface and tools no longer match (this is not speculation, we have seen this in the forum).

So, my personal advice is to not worry too much about preserving Roland's videos. Instead, learn from him, and create new videos with a modern version of FreeCAD, say, v0.19. Try recreating the same model that Roland made, but with a v0.19 workflow; in my opinion, this would be more helpful than just storing the older videos as if they were FreeCAD's ultimate treasure.