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0 pointsMizza6y ago0 comments

I actually respectfully disagree with this. In my travels, I have encountered many situations where very niche, industry-specific software is completely Free and Open Source, and I have encountered situations where commonly-used, widely useful software is proprietary with no Free solution.

On the Free side, I think one reason is the copyleft nature of the GPL. Another pattern indicator is how modular the software is - smaller bits are easier to open source than massive projects - and the general inclinations of the programmers, their bosses, and their legal teams.

That being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a Free alternative to AutoCAD in 2020. (Pipes 3D is an AutoCAD extention). It's widely used software across numerous industries, much like Photoshop, Illustrator or Audition, but there is no Free alternative that I'm aware of.

A particularly annoying thing to me here is that AVEVA was actually originally developed and owned by the British government, but it was privatized (I think under Thatcher.) I think the value created for the tax payer would have been much greater to create free tools and software and make them available to everybody rather than just whatever pittance they got from selling it during a privatization firesale.

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safwan6y ago

The reason of not having a open source alternative of CAD is not having proper domain knowledge. The people who have the domain knowledge are not taking that intiative that the early stage software engineers took.

spectramax6y ago

Were these open-source projects result of academic research or someone's dissertation? If so, then yes, many niche packages, for e.g. from CERN are open source even though no one has the ability to go and build their own particle accelerator.

Another exception is public works paid by taxes such as Government open source projects.

And yet, in commercial industry where I've worked - it is hard to find anything that's useful and can replace internal software because there are no free alternatives. I don't expect these things to be out and open!

79526y ago

I think AutoCAD has an Excel like quality within a lot of industries. It is ridiculously versatile, but often used in a very primitive and risky way. And often you end up with a "drawing" that lacks any of the properties of high quality data. It is used like a really advanced pencil with a thousand nebulous features. That is not a good basis for an open source tool, it is just not well defined enough.

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