Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi...
by _delirium on Saturday September 11, 2010 @04:34AM
(#1681217)
Yeah, it's an unfortunate niche. I think it's the sort of thing where there are companies that would be happy to contribute back code, but only if a CAD program were already at 80% of their needs. But without commercial support, the hobbyist-CAD community is way too small to get a system to that 80% to begin with. Lots of industry doesn't really enjoy paying large per-seat license fees for the dominant CAD systems, so I think they'd be willing to work on an open-source one and contribute back, the way embedded-systems companies do with Linux, but they aren't willing to take a leap onto something that isn't there yet
BRL-CAD's particular problems are because it's sort of a time-capsule project, I think. It's an Army project from the 1980s that was open-sourced in 2004, but is still very "1980s Unix workstation" in a lot of ways, and the ratio of interested developers to giant crufty codebase has meant that modernizing it is slow.
Their FAQ ( http://brlcad.org/wiki/FAQ ) tells me that the silly thing can't even print out a drawing normally! Essentially, you render your current view to a BLR-CAD format, use a command line tool to turn that into a PNG, then print that via some other program, not supplied.
Does nobody using it print enough things to want a normal print dialog? If anyone wants to see what I mean, look for the question "How do I get a hard copy of what I'm looking at in MGED?" (MGED is the geometry editor for BRL-CAD.)
To be fair, their list of priorities DOES list UI improvement. I'll have to see if I can find some ways to help... assuming I figure out how to use this thing.