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.
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.