User:Duncan/Notes/upfrontezine
Here's some answers for Ralph Grabowski.
What position do you see OSARCH having in the architectural design world -- supporting role, minor player, major actor?
OSArch (Open Source in Architecture) is about bringing a more ethical approach to the software we use in architecture, engineering, construction and operations. We support moving the industry toward more openness and more collaboration. At our core we support and encourage projects bringing professionals together to develop the software tools we need to do our job well. This means developing and supporting software developed as free/libre and open source (FLOSS) and the use of open standards such as those developed by buildingSMART, the W3C and several others.
Our Free Software Directory has well over 100 projects covering everything from computational Fluid Dynamics (OpenFOAM), Structural Analysis (Code_Aster) to presentation and document editing and authoring (Scribus & Inkscape).
Where this will all go is hard to know, but we're not a corporation reliant on backers or income. Maybe we'll end up with huge influence and a generous budget to support and coordinate projects that challenge the status quo. Maybe not. What's clear is that the ideas we represent are not going away, and is increasingly acknowledged by the industry. More and more, the most tech savvy people in AECO rely on FLOSS to do their jobs and when developing in-house solutions. My own knowledge is about what happens in architectural offices. There you can see growing use and support for FLOSS solutions like Speckle to fix the industry's interoperability problem. In building physics, FLOSS projects such as Radiance, EnergyPlus, and OpenFOAM are tried and battle-tested as the reference standard. For users, Ladybug Tools and their Pollination platform sees increasing support pulling many tools together. Those are just two super stars of a movement in AECO.
At what point are major software pieces, such as LibreCAD, Code_Aster, and LibreDWG?
Some projects are very mature and stable and some projects are in rapid bleeding edge development. QCAD Community Edition is libre software and is a quite capable 2D CAD package. They sell a commercial version which adds some non-core functionality such as DWG support and help fund the development of the community edition.
Code_Aster is one of the few FOSS tools that is being developed and completely backed by a multinational company, Électricité de France, commonly known as EDF. EDF, a French electric utility company largely owned by the French state, has been developing Code_Aster over the last 30 years and released it as a FOSS tool in October 19th, 2001. In EDF, it is used to analyze, design and verify new and existing infrastructure assets along their whole life-cycle.
Within OSArch, Code_Aster is one of the fundamental pieces of a structural analysis pipeline that is under development since the beginning of 2020. The first part of this workflow is the definition of the OpenBIM Structural Model (OSM), this project is developed within the BlenderBIM Add-on, over the last 4 months. This task is about 30~40% complete. The second part of the workflow is related to the conversion of the OpenBIM Structural Model to a Code_Aster structural model and then performing structural loads analysis. This part was the first to be developed as IFC-to-Code_Aster (ifc2ca) and is currently about 20~30% complete. Other parts of the "structural analysis pipeline" have not been developed yet; these are related to the visualization of structural results in Blender or other OpenBIM-enabled tools, although it should be noted that there exist FOSS tools such as Salome_Meca that are designed for visualizing Code_Aster results, and for verification of structural members according to specific structural codes, with this last task being quite broad and challenging to address holistically. A special mention should be made for adapy, a FLOSS python library released a few months ago, that has the potential to work with Code_Aster but also other FLOSS structural solvers to be considered in the structural workflow. Adapy is still in early phases of development, yet features complete "proof of concept" examples and specific development for a user-friendly procedure to install all needed packages for performing the structural analysis on a desktop computer.
LibreDWG supports DWG, DXF and SVG. It is just in the last year starting to be integrated into some projects so I'm not sure how much testing it has seen in real world scenarios. It works for me inside FreeCAD. It looks like 3D DWG is really going to be a challenge. Some solid testing and support for LibreDWG could make a huge shift in the industry opening up a whole world of legacy files to FLOSS projects. LibreDWG is not the only FLOSS DWG project, but it is the most advanced.
Examples of software in very rapid development are FreeCAD & the BlenderBIM Add-on. We have some great examples of how companies like OpeningDesign and Open Source Ecology use free software on commercial projects. Larger companies also use both FreeCAD & the BlenderBIM Add-on in aspects of their workflows. Universities are also starting to introduce these software in their courses and in BIM academic research. In their current state, they are not yet a drop-in replacement for the average user to replace the entire suite of tools currently offered by Autodesk, Bentley and Dassault. However, depending on the scale of the project, the usecase the user has, and the technical abilities of the team, certain features are more mature than others and are already creating commercial value. In other aspects, both FreeCAD and the BlenderBIM Add-on have far surpassed the proprietary solutions and are pioneering, such as in native support for international BIM standards, semantic drawing generation, and cross-disciplinary support. These technical feats, contributions to the cross-platform OpenCAD ecosystem, and forays into uncharted territory have been recognized by the buildingSMART technology awards in 2020 (the video presentation is a great intro to many of these topics), Google Summer of Code programme 2021, and most recently, the Epic MegaGrants programme. At this point it is very difficult to be specific on exactly what's ready and what isn't as it is so context sensitive, but development in both projects are accelerating, and we are excited to see where this goes.
We have several IFC based projects: lossless round tripping IFC files between software, implementing energy analysis, structural analysis, implementing cost planning, construction sequencing, and projects drawings. All working directly inside the IFC schema deeper than any other projects that I know of and working with buildingSMART to make it all work smoothly.
It might sound like lots of little tools. That's how things work outside the monoliths with their walled gardens of proprietary solutions and poor interoperability. It's means that as projects mature and your needs change you switch out parts of your workflow with something else.
How is OSARCH funded?
At the moment we cover our costs for digital infrastructure via donations to the Liberapay platform. We plan to join a fiscal host so we can start fundraising and accelerate our work with corporate sponsors. We do have a list of financial sponsors ready to support us but we don't yet have a legal structure to make this possible. We'd love to hear from anyone who wants to support our efforts. We're also happy to help anyone find projects they'd like to support directly.
Where does the programming prowess come from?
In contrast to how I imagine most software companies work we are not staffed by software experts from outside our field. Most programmers who support our aims are AEC professionals first and programming is either part of their work or a passion on the side. However, being open source, programming contributions can come from anywhere. Increasingly, it makes business sense for AEC tech startups, and powerusers within larger AEC firms to reuse free software instead of reinventing the wheel, and as a result we see many commercially funded contributions as well. Being open source, it is easier for us to share resources and coding expertise across projects, so a little programming can go a long way. OSArch helps act as a medium through which these synergies across projects can be formed, so that together we can solve more complex problems, knowing that all our projects are interdependent in the AEC ecosystem.
I hope this text was useful as an introduction to what OSArch is all about
Duncan Lithgow
