Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

[jmaustpc]

FreeCAD having a hard dependency on another CAD software just seems wrong to me.

Anyway, even if freecad uses algorithms from openscad, the openscad application itself is not mandatory, so in terms of packages, freecad doesn't depend on openscad. It just -I suppose- includes some of its code in its source code...

I asked about this because I was wondering about the implications of including code with the GPL licence in core stuff in FreeCAD.

Perhaps I have this wrong? The point of LGPL is that it allows someone to distribute a version of FreeCAD that also includes some non-GPL compatible software, right? So if someone wants to do that now, they would have to first remove all the GPL code from FreeCAD and just distribute the FreeCAD code that is LGPL?


On another matter, the wiki, I have been making quite a few modifications. When are you wanting editing to stop, so you can pull the offline version into FreeCAD 0.14?

I went through the Part Command pages that have dead links to an icon due to the "command" template trying to auto insert the associated "name" dot "png" image. in many cases the icon is not named according to that scheme for various reasons and also we have migrated to svg files. So I have gone to all those "dead link" file pages and inserted a "redirect" to the appropriate svg file page. It seems to work, I think it does not at first due to caching of some sort. I tried clearing my Browser cache, and using a different browser, with some successes and the occasional failure. A tip for what does seem to work in this scenario is to enter the edit mode for the page, then click on "show preview", this seems to force a reload of some cache somewhere, and then the Part command pages correctly displayed their icons (via the redirection). If someone wants to look at some of them you could try
Part_Prism
Part_Circle
Part_Line
Part_Ellipsoid

and several others.


Jim

[shoogen]

Perhaps I have this wrong? The point of LGPL is that it allows someone to distribute a version of FreeCAD that also includes some non-GPL compatible software, right? So if someone wants to do that now, they would have to first remove all the GPL code from FreeCAD and just distribute the FreeCAD code that is LGPL?

The question is if FreeCAD gets infected by the GPL. The fact that we ship binaries of GPLed software is not crtical. The way we interact with them, has to be taken into consideration. Using a program like you would do in a shell script is believed to be fine. Shipping a small wrapper GPL application around a GPL binary, just to circumvent direct linking is consider bad.
What we do with the mesh booleans is somewhere in-between. We are just using OpenSCAD to calculate the booleans with CGAL. On the other hand we did not implement a stupid GPL wrapper. (Thou we could compile openscad without the Qt gui for that purpose)
If would would ask me for my personal opinion. I would not include OpenSCAD in binary packages. Opening SCAD documents and doing mesh booleans, are niche applications. All lot of users will not use them. (Much like povray or an FEM solver)

[wmayer]

I asked about this because I was wondering about the implications of including code with the GPL licence in core stuff in FreeCAD.

Again, we do NOT use any OpenSCAD code there. The mesh module simply loads the OpenSCADUtils module and uses its meshoptempfile() function. That's all!
And this implies that the dependency to OpenSCAD is rather weak, i.e. if the executable is not there the mesh boolean operations don't work but the rest of mesh still works properly.

Using OpenSCAD this way doesn't touch the LGPL of FreeCAD at all because it's considered an "aggregated work". For more information, see: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.htm ... ggregation

[jmaustpc]

The question is if FreeCAD gets infected by the GPL.

Again, we do NOT use any OpenSCAD code there. The mesh module simply loads the OpenSCADUtils module and uses its meshoptempfile() function. That's all!
And this implies that the dependency to OpenSCAD is rather weak, i.e. if the executable is not there the mesh boolean operations don't work but the rest of mesh still works properly.

Thanks for the explanations guys,

When I first loaded up this machine with Kubuntu 14.04 and FreeCAD, I had not yet installed OpenSCAD, I went to try something in the OpenSCAD work bench and I got a warning at some point telling me something along the lines of FreeCAD can't find OpenSCAD, or something along those lines.... does FreeCAD give some similar warning if Mesh Booleans are attempted if OpenSCAD is not installed?

If would would ask me for my personal opinion. I would not include OpenSCAD in binary packages. Opening SCAD documents and doing mesh booleans, are niche applications. All lot of users will not use them. (Much like povray or an FEM solver)

I agree that it is best to install OpenSCAD separately, partly because of the size of the download but also because many people may well already have it installed and want to then later install FreeCAD, etc..

However I think if it makes Booleans with STL files reliable then it may well become an important and popular FreeCAD feature, for all those people getting "stuff" for 3d printing from places like thingieverse etc., who might want to just do some minor modifications via booleans, to an STL file.

[NormandC]

does FreeCAD give some similar warning if Mesh Booleans are attempted if OpenSCAD is not installed?

Yes, I tried it this week on Ubuntu 14.04.

The message is very explicit and says something along the lines of "you need to install OpenSCAD for mesh boolean operations" and it also gives the website url.

[jreinhardt]

I just translated the last string for the german translation of the Release notes (but a lot of the work was done by bernd). The polish release notes are 18% translated, the italian 59%, french 8% at the moment.

[kwahoo]

The polish release notes are 18% translated,

I'm going to work on it later this week. Don't wait for me;)

[shoogen]

I got "Cannot find icon: Sketcher_Hexagon". Can anyone reproduce this error message?

[wmayer]

I got "Cannot find icon: Sketcher_Hexagon". Can anyone reproduce this error message?

Yes, there is no such icon. We should create one before the release. BTW, today I implemented exactly this function.

[jmaustpc]

I got "Cannot find icon: Sketcher_Hexagon". Can anyone reproduce this error message?

Yes, there is no such icon. We should create one before the release. BTW, today I implemented exactly this function.

On the up side, I made one that matches the other sketcher icons, its here
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=6352

However I was thinking of modifying it once I tried the function so I can see how it works.

Also Juergen (and I) were wondering if we should come up with some more simplified scheme for the "profiles" as there may need to be many and they may need a more simplistic icon so that more detail can be shown.

Jim