If you know folk in the industry - I'd be keen to know what work needs funding to be enough to move from Autodesk to OpenSCAD or similar

Fusion supports a wide range of use case from CAD to CAM and others. None of open source tools (FreeCad, OpenSCAD, Opencad etc.) come close to matching Fusion's features. I don't think most even support CAM which I need for CNC tool paths.

Happy to chat more if you're interested in it.

I'm keen to connect - my email is on my profile if you'd like to.

Just connected to another via this same thread.

I do wonder if there's enough engineers that started in the 00's and are now almost retired looking to work on righting some wrongs in our industry :D

> engineers that started in the 00's and are now almost retired

That's a different take on age discrimination in hiring than I'm used to seeing!

I’ve been using OnShape, which is pretty nice.

I'm currently in an adjacent industry and used a variety of CAD packages in previous work. What you're suggesting is noble, but not really feasible. If you want specifics (and there's a lot of them), let me know and I can shoot you an email.

Heya, yeah I'm keen to understand your thoughts on this.

UX is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for two reasons:

Open source software historically treats users as an afterthought (or worse makes really terrible attempts at courting them like GIMP).

Different CAD suites use different terms and have radically different interfaces. There's a lot of (un)learning to do. Go fillet something in Fusion then try to do the same in FreeCAD. Not only is the interface ever so slightly different than Fusion, you have to navigate a minefield of bugs and limitations in FreeCAD. Yikes.

But by comparing Autodesk (presumably Fusion and not e.g. Buzzsaw or Maya) to OpenSCAD you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison. OpenSCAD is a thin wrapper around a CAD programming language, it's an entirely different than something like SolidWorks or Fusion.

You must be young. In the late 90's most corporate software were utterly different from each other.

You must be inexperienced and/or naive. No firm is going force its engineers to migrate to a different package (open source or otherwise), the cost of relearning everything is simply too high. This was true in the 90s as well.

The case for hobbyists is a bit different as they're often more willing to try something like FreeCAD that's missing a bunch of features or makes them far more tedious to implement. Try dealing with parameters in FreeCAD. Or, better yet, recreate this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj9Sc5PPTnU

> someone who uses and relies on Fusion for work

To be fair, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.

Autodesk has been completely hostile to their customers (because said customers are a captive audience and they know it) since the 90's, so what is happening here should not come as a surprise to anyone.