User:Duncan/Notes/upfrontezine
Here's my answers to Ralph Grabowsi, if you feel they are misleading or something is missing just add it to this thread, I'll send him the link. He's been reading this thread so he's got an idea of who we are.
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 OpenSource and/or free/libre (FLOSS) and the use of open standards such as those developed by buildingSmart, the W3C and several others.
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 quoeo . Maybe not. What's clear is that the ideas we represent are not going away. More and more the most tech savvy people in AECO know and rely on FOSS to do their jobs and to develop in-house solutions. My own knowledge is about what happens in architectural offices. There you can see growing use and support for FOSS solutions like Speckle to fix the industries interoperability problem. In environment simulation Ladybug Tools and their Pollination platform sees increasing support pulling many tools together. Those are just two super stars of a movement in AECO. Our 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).
Cyril Waechter can you check what I wrote about Ladybug?
At what point are major software pieces, such as LibreCAD, CodeAster, and LibreDWG?
Some projects are very mature and stable and some projects are in rapid bleeding edge development. QCAD is a quite capable 2D CAD package and uses a commercial model where buying a professional version add some functionality such as DWG support and helps the development of the community edition.
CodeAster ... User:Jesusbill can you help here?
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 to FLOSS projects. LibreDWG is not the only FLOSS DWG project, but it is the most advanced.
Hi there User:Moult can you check this about FreeCAD/BlenderBIM?
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 are exclusively software like this on commercial projects. But are they really viable competition to Autodesk, Bentley and Dassault? I'd say they're not, but they get closer every day and as more projects see the advantages of cooperating on making great software which serves our needs - the development accelerates. As an example we not long ago were contacted by a single developer who had made a piece of custom software in his company for tracking project costs. He presented the project and several developers saw it and started meeting and working on it. It has inspired an effort leveraging the power of the IFC data schema to project planning and costing. Just in general BlenderBIM Add-on powered by IfcOpenShell is aiming for 100% of the IFC spec. That's going in territory we think is uncharted. Epic Games has seen so much potential that they've included BlenderBIM in their MegaGrant program.
We have several IFC based projects: round tripping IFC files lossless between software, implementing energy analysis, implementing structural analysis, implementing project planning and implementing projects drawings. All working directly inside the IFC schema deeper than any other projects that I know of (please correct me if I'm wrong) and working with buildingSMART to make it all work better and more smoothly.
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 sponsers 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 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. All the programmers I know of who support our aims are AEC professionals first and programming is either part of their work or a passion on the side. There is an increasing number of companies who can see that contributing to FLOSS projects helps them meet their own goals while also gaining from others who do the same. Honestly, how many little extensions to Revit do we need when many of them can be part of pyRevit?
