Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.
It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.
Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.
> It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.
Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/investment.
> Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve
Valve is not a rogue company.
> Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back
Your premise is wrong. It's impossible to leach off something that is freely given. This is like being angry because people don't all tip a street performer. The deal is it's free.
And your facts are wrong. Businesses fund a giant amount of OSS work.
Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.
IMO the primary limiting factor in FreeCAD at this point is OpenCascade, the CAD kernel, and that is owned by a large org: CapGemini, which has 350,000 employees.
OCC is the domain where FreeCAD's biggest limitations (fillets, chamfers, draft, thickness) are found, and the design of its API is part of why the topological naming problem was so difficult to mitigate.
You need more than a couple of good devs to solve this, or CapGemini would have. CAD kernels are one of the hardest possible things to write in a way that is bug-free, which is why there are so few of them.
I think it is possible that OpenCascade will get more attention because of EDF (french multinational power company) and the French atomic energy commission's involvement in SALOME. Things do seem to be slightly improving.
It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.
Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.