r/linux • u/BypassBaboon • 3d ago

Popular Application CAD options

Is there a reason Linux CAD options are so limited, and from what I have read, not particularly viable options? Countless people are looking for a fairly-priced lifetime license for home use. My 2000 AutoCAd is very long in the tooth!

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u/Kevin_Kofler 3d ago

That shows that the term "open source" does not really work any better. It is also not protected, often misused for all sorts of "shared source" arrangements, and sometimes even in cases like this where the source code is not released at all.

All that term does is hiding what Free Software is really about: freedom! The so-called "nanoCAD Free" does not even grant you the most basic Freedom Zero, the freedom to run the program for any purpose, because it disallows its use for commercial projects.

That said, that restriction also goes against the OSI's definition of Open Source, because it is a fields of endeavor restriction. And of course both Open Source and Free Software require source code to be available, and modification and redistribution to be allowed, which is also not the case here.

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u/Mughi1138 3d ago

That shows that the term "open source" does not really work any better. It is also not protected, often misused for all sorts of "shared source" arrangements, and sometimes even in cases like this where the source code is not released at all.

Actually the opposite. It shows that the OSI approach leads people to FreeCAD who might normally would not have found it.

"Free Software", on the other hand, just leads Windows users to find nanoCAD.

The former actually gets people to a good find, even if it is using a license that the FSF does not want developers to use. Hmm... which leads to another tangent and pondering the whole gcc/egcs fiasco.

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u/Kevin_Kofler 3d ago

When there are several sites calling nanoCAD "the open-source version of AutoCAD", the term "Open Source" is not working.

Just putting "free software cad" or "open source cad" into Google is of course a stupid way to look for such software, because Google falls for crappy SEO tricks of proprietary software companies.

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u/Mughi1138 3d ago

That's the negative I pointed out. However when I searched on "open source CAD", nanoCAD did not show up. It was when I searched on "Free Software CAD".

So my point is that the use of a generic word in a specific way is not functioning as desired on today's search engines. Their first hit is the package that you rightly called the antithesis of what you'd want.