The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.

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JoshTriplett 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On a scale from "big chunk of work" to "complete rewrite", how much work would it take to fix those issues in Open Cascade?

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bsder 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sandia seems to have some form of kernel, but only Federal-associated entities can get access to it.

It would be interesting to see if they would license that out further for some amount of money.

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bgoated01 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you're referring to Cubit, they license the ACIS kernel under the hood.

	▲	CoreformGreg 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They’re (possibly) referring to “Scalable Geometric Modeler” (SGM) https://github.com/sandialabs/sgm Originally open-source, but since taken back in-house. As I understand, which should not be construed as an accurate accounting, Sandia wants to flesh out the basics further before (potentially) open-sourcing it again.