I must disagree with you there. I get more support from the open source community and their things than I do from commercial stuff. Commercial pretends to offer support that isn’t actually there in 2025. They just have call centers that tell you to reboot and then escalate, which basically turns into stalling until you figure it out yourself.
When was the last time you got support for a Google product? What about Microsoft? Apple? Apple used to have decent support but it’s all the same offshored nonsense that the others have now. Hearing “I don’t know” in an Indian accent isn’t support. Microsoft is the worst of the bunch. They have an entire industry set up with people saying you can get support in their ecosystem but it’s all third parties pointing at eachother and no one taking any responsibility.
I must disagree with you there. I get more support from the open source community and their things than I do from commercial stuff.
I would say this is true, but only in a way that largely misses the finer details and thus the bigger picture.
The biggest example I can think of that that I feel generally represents what I was saying, is the difference between Fusion 360 and FreeCAD, where its free, because thats the value of your time if you use it.
FreeCAD will have a higher likelyhood to have you find a community helper to help with a specific technical problem, and while Autodesk does respond to tickets, they are less hands on and if your ticket gets resolved youll just get a notification a month or 2 later if lucky.
The thing is, Fusion is actually usable, and FreeCAD is painful to use. It is so painful, I won’t even hear the tired “people just aren’t used to it” arguments people love to trot out about it.
It purposefully uses UX that doesn’t match the patterns of any other CAD package, that people (enough that I am comfortable generalizing) find utterly unintuitive, and has had major issues that go unsolved simply because they’re not seen to be issues.
They literally only recently, after literal decades of existing partially solved the most famous problem, the topological naming problem, and they still don’t allow multiple profiles in one sketch.
Its Free, and maybe in some ways it could be said to have “support” but … if you make any money at all, you’d be literally better paying 800 bucks a year to Autodesk to not have to deal with it.
Just to be super clear if you aren’t familiar, Onshape, Solidworks, Inventor, whatever. All of them anyone who has used any of them can switch over and be proficient enough in minutes.
FreeCAD is the far outlier.
It’s so bad, because of the underlying spaghetti code, that some venture capitalists came in, thinking they could just fix the UX and then sell cloud services ontop, tried to fix it, realized the fire, realized there was no way they could make it profitable within a reasonable amount of time, and shut down.
That being said, I fully realize that FreeCAD is at the Gimp end of the spectrum and not the Blender end of the spectrum (with Blender being so good and useful that it is (in places) actually used in industry.
If it makes you feel better (read worse) my company buys around 500,000 chips a year, and we’re still effectively in the same support tier as an individual user.
I’ve pushed for chips with upstream Linux kernel support, even though they’re more expensive, because it’s so bad with proprietary software
Might want to point out doing so now will insulate your company from the shock of being forced to migrate down the road. The entire industry is throwing money into AI in the foreground, while in the background they are preparing their transition away once it explodes and takes titans down.
Everyone outside the US is moving away from the proprietary model.
I must disagree with you there. I get more support from the open source community and their things than I do from commercial stuff. Commercial pretends to offer support that isn’t actually there in 2025. They just have call centers that tell you to reboot and then escalate, which basically turns into stalling until you figure it out yourself.
When was the last time you got support for a Google product? What about Microsoft? Apple? Apple used to have decent support but it’s all the same offshored nonsense that the others have now. Hearing “I don’t know” in an Indian accent isn’t support. Microsoft is the worst of the bunch. They have an entire industry set up with people saying you can get support in their ecosystem but it’s all third parties pointing at eachother and no one taking any responsibility.
I would say this is true, but only in a way that largely misses the finer details and thus the bigger picture.
The biggest example I can think of that that I feel generally represents what I was saying, is the difference between Fusion 360 and FreeCAD, where its free, because thats the value of your time if you use it.
FreeCAD will have a higher likelyhood to have you find a community helper to help with a specific technical problem, and while Autodesk does respond to tickets, they are less hands on and if your ticket gets resolved youll just get a notification a month or 2 later if lucky.
The thing is, Fusion is actually usable, and FreeCAD is painful to use. It is so painful, I won’t even hear the tired “people just aren’t used to it” arguments people love to trot out about it.
It purposefully uses UX that doesn’t match the patterns of any other CAD package, that people (enough that I am comfortable generalizing) find utterly unintuitive, and has had major issues that go unsolved simply because they’re not seen to be issues.
They literally only recently, after literal decades of existing partially solved the most famous problem, the topological naming problem, and they still don’t allow multiple profiles in one sketch.
Its Free, and maybe in some ways it could be said to have “support” but … if you make any money at all, you’d be literally better paying 800 bucks a year to Autodesk to not have to deal with it.
Just to be super clear if you aren’t familiar, Onshape, Solidworks, Inventor, whatever. All of them anyone who has used any of them can switch over and be proficient enough in minutes.
FreeCAD is the far outlier.
It’s so bad, because of the underlying spaghetti code, that some venture capitalists came in, thinking they could just fix the UX and then sell cloud services ontop, tried to fix it, realized the fire, realized there was no way they could make it profitable within a reasonable amount of time, and shut down.
That being said, I fully realize that FreeCAD is at the Gimp end of the spectrum and not the Blender end of the spectrum (with Blender being so good and useful that it is (in places) actually used in industry.
If it makes you feel better (read worse) my company buys around 500,000 chips a year, and we’re still effectively in the same support tier as an individual user.
I’ve pushed for chips with upstream Linux kernel support, even though they’re more expensive, because it’s so bad with proprietary software
Might want to point out doing so now will insulate your company from the shock of being forced to migrate down the road. The entire industry is throwing money into AI in the foreground, while in the background they are preparing their transition away once it explodes and takes titans down.
Everyone outside the US is moving away from the proprietary model.