CAD software integration

[Jacobo Aragunde Pérez]

Hi Gastón,

first of all, thanks for your interest in LibreOffice and in open source.

El 10/11/15 a las 19:42, Gastón J. Avila escribió:
> Hi all,
> 
> With a number of people we have been evaluating open-source CAD
> applications. We would like to know if you think it would be a good idea
> to start a working on adding to the set of applications offered by
> libreoffice, one CAD application.
> 

In LibreOffice community you can find around 80 different monthly code
contributors, and that's not even counting QA, localization or
documentation. Still, some pieces of our package are not as good as we
would like (I'm looking at you, Base).

You can see where my answer is going: the effort of developing and
maintaining a new piece in this puzzle is huge. Even more with something
so complex as CAD software. The existing community won't be able to
absorb that workload, even in case they/we wanted to.

> There are a number of opensource alternatives to products like autocad
> but none of them seem actively developed, so we would like to know to
> which extent it is possible to have a libreoffice application be
> developed outside the current choices of language+build system.
> 

It's really unfortunate there is a lack of FLOSS offer in such an
important area, but that shouldn't be put on the shoulders of the LO
community. Trying to gather a community around one of the existing tools
or a new one, ideally with some actors providing funding in the shape of
development time or money to hire it, should be a more successful (but
difficult and costly) approach.

Best regards,
-- 
Jacobo Aragunde
Software Engineer at Igalia