In 2010, Ries van Twisk decided to add CAM features to the Community Edition of QCAD and instead got himself into working on the Qt4 port and then on the core features of what later became LibreCAD.
Some chosen script extensions and modules could have been released under a different license, creating a new business model. All in all, no reason for hard feelings.Īccording to Andrew Mustun, an open source version of QCAD 3 was also planned and would have made perfect sense from a community perspective as well as a business perspective: Reportedly, there have been few patches and more other kinds of contributions - translations, CAD part library items, fonts, hatch patterns. The lack of strong opinions on the matter could partially be explained by the lack of source code contributions. Andrew says that feedback about QCAD, the QCAD community edition and the business model was mostly positive with very few negative voices. The final release of QCAD 3.0 followed in summer 2012.īefore you ask, according to Ribbonsoft, the whole idea of mixing the open source and the closed source business models wasn’t exactly controversial. The community edition was years old by the time. It was the first new public release of QCAD since late 2009. Indeed, around 2009 the company started rewriting QCAD and released the first public beta version of QCad v3.0 in August 2011. According to Andrew, the time gap between them was usually about a year, and it increased while the lead developer was working on QCAD 3, since there was nothing new to release during that period of completely rewriting QCAD. The difference between commercial and free versions was mostly about amount of features and the date of availability. QCAD is a CAD system for Windows, Mac and Linux, created by Ribbonsoft and available in two editions: the commercial one and the free one called Community Edition (GPLv2). As if recent LibreDWG story wasn’t quite sufficient, the most recent news is that Ribbonsoft is not going to release Community Edition of QCAD right now.
It’s quite disturbing how much controversy a small software niche can get in a relatively small timeframe.
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