FreeCAD the most unusual popular open source project in a "Good Way" 💖

Four years ago I started working on a simple C++ library called "AppImage Updater Bridge. This project was a alternative to the AppImage Update library made by the AppImage folks. The upstream project used a lot of legacy code and was tailored for more vanilla C++ folks and was sort of like a reference implementation. Also they lacked good documentation. But I can't blame the upstream because they are more focused on the core functionality of AppImages.

My new C++ library was geared towards the Qt folks. The goal was to make a Qt plugin which can do the update mechanism with less legacy code and make full use of the Qt framework. The software was made to work as a standalone library and a plugin to be used with Update Deploy Qt.

My main end goal for this piece of software is to use it with Update Deploy Qt which can give any Qt based Application a nice updater with zero code change and this is programming language independent. This idea was very old but still I'm lazy to execute this idea 😅😅😅

In the past I've tried to ask some Qt folks to try this project if they thought about giving their application which is packaged as AppImage a nice updater.

The first person to adopt is technic93(I have no idea about his real name). He is the author and maintainer of e2designer which is a "Skin editor for enigma2" (I have no idea about enigma2 😆). Go checkout his/her project or his/her other works.

There was lot of people, only small open source projects were ready to adopt this. Some say Open Source is like business, I think that a lot of developers think that way that's why when a open source project gets huge they are very picky and would wish for stability over cutting edge.

One such software might be qTox, It's a chatting application which is secure. They actually used my library for like 2 weeks, Then they just said it lacks more eyes on the project(Hmm... in a word stars) so they reverted my changes. And this actually took significant work to implement in their application. But I never minded because my end goal was not make the qTox folks use it anyway. I just wanted more users on board to see if I really did a good job.

Now let's come to FreeCAD.

Quoting from Wikipedia, "FreeCAD is a free and open-source (under the LGPLv2+ license) general-purpose parametric 3D computer-aided design (CAD) modeler and a building information modeling (BIM) software with finite element method (FEM) support".

So you get the idea. In simple words it's a 3D modeler and open source alternative for other Computer Aided Design softwares which costs a lot.

Recently I've talked to some FreeCAD users and developers. They all seem like nice folks. The community is huge and diverse that they don't put all the work on a single person like what some open source projects do.

The author of the AppImage project itself opened a issue on FreeCAD for a self-update from FreeCAD itself. See this issue for the entire conversation. One user with the handle luzpaz also insisted FreeCAD.

Finally everything was in place because of Lorenz Lechner, one of the core contributors to FreeCAD who helped to setup everything and make a alpha release.

I was actually not expecting much response from this improvement because you know there is the official update tools and stuff so why would anyone use the inbuilt updater.

But I was wrong because FreeCAD is a unusual popular open source project because they listen to every single member of the community. And they are not very picky like other popular projects. They are simple.

And on October 14th 2020 they tweeted about this new feature,

I hope every popular open source project listen to the community and not just force something to them. Forcing something in open source is not really good. Firefox does it and Gnome does it. They are the fastest way to kill a project.

Thanks for taking your time to read this post.