Friday, April 29, 2022

I Think You Meant Marginal Cost

How Is Fusion 360 Free For Hobbyists Definition Of Woke Ideology transformed our lives in The Newest YearAnd then you give it to them for years, eventually asking money for a few things, all the while, still giving things out for free, and they complain that you shouldn't charge money because you already make money. Most personal users will just move to other free or cheaper software. OpenSCAD is constructive solid geometry. You write a script then render it. That’s good to know I can edit stl’s right in openscad. Most users use conda to get all the dependencies going which is a horrible monstrosity. But wow cadquery looks like quite an improvement. I’d prefer to work in python anyway. If you're looking for an intermediate thing, check out cadquery, which uses the same geometry engine as FreeCAD but has a very OpenSCAD-like feel and language to it. OpenSCAD itself just visualizes these. Allows you to easily set parameters via a GUI. IMO this approach does not work for more complex models, makes small iterations much much slower. The difference between F360 and OpenSCAD is huge, its like comparing Paint to Photoshop. It's an amazingly capable software, and you don't have to fear it will one day be bought by autodesk and ruined. Solidworks parent company just did the same thing with their 2D Autocad alternative DraftSight.


It's kind of analogous to Qualcomm's stranglehold over cellular communications. If you don't pay them you're also throwing away decades of IP and tooling around it, and lose interoperability. In the end, I will probably give TurboCad another spin in a year or so when the next set of fusion360 feature removals happen. I used it a bit a few years ago and have that copy, and they continue to sell a "permanent" license version that is fairly reasonably priced. Plus, it looks like they have done a fair bit of additional work to make it work better for 3d. I can get things like limiting cloud storage . That's just 100% "screw you, now we have your projects and you can't get them out". They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is free, kids!". If Fusion360 really is too expensive, please go use FreeCAD--they need users, tutorials, coders, etc. $300/year (temporarily discounted from $500) is way too much for "advanced hobby use". I think $50/year or $100/major version is my limit for hobby software. The hidden subsidies of advertising monetization. Data collection have done an excellent job of this. In Autodesk's case, it was enterprise customers paying tens and hundreds of thousands for license seats, so that private parties could use it for free. The thing is there's some tools and technologies that humanity deserves to offer itself (a.k.a to develop a high quality OSS offering). Don't get scared by this statement, just bare with me for a second and assume it to be true. Humanity has offered itself OSS/copyfree/patent free technological gifts like an OS kernel, an SCM tool, an electronic CAD software, ML/data science packages, the wheel, etc. I posit that we need to produce long lasting artifacts that anyone, anywhere, can use and reproduce, especially if those artifacts are core to reaching our current technological level. This way, 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, we'll all have been the better for it. Your implication here seems to be that Autodesk can't possibly be doing something bad because they have "families to feed", get a grip man. The idea that a billion dollar company is somehow financially equivalent to a mom-and-pop grocery store just a few lost purchases away from ruin and going through hard times is insane. People have got to get it through their heads that billion dollar companies do not operate by the same constraints as the rest of us, they aren't charging money because they need to, but because they can.


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