Ondsel Onward Fund

[yorikvanhavre]

The FPA has received a donation of EUR 40 000 intended from private, anonymous donors to rescue the assets and code owned by Ondsel, clean the code, open-source it and transfer their ownership to the FreeCAD project.

A project is being set up with former Onsdel collaborators to do that transition. This issue will track how the fund is used.

[Reqrefusion]

This is great. Considering the size of the money and the amount of work involved, this should not remain an issue only in the FPA. I believe that somehow announcing this in the blog would be a better step for transparency. Also, more people will learn about this great news.

[yorikvanhavre]

There is a blog post coming IIRC

[pieterhijma]

As I discuss in my blog post, I requested funding from NLnet for continuing the work on the Ondsel code. Together with the Ondsel team members and with direction from the anonymous donors, we set up an overarching development plan to continue the work on the Ondsel code to make it useful for a wider community, targeting Open Source Hardware projects as well.

Although the outcome of the NLnet grant application is still unknown, I would like to share the overarching development plan for this Ondsel Onward fund and for the NLnet grant here:

The vision is to have an integrated system with broad community interest that:

1. can visualize FreeCAD and STEP files (and support other file types in the future such as KiCad files),
2. permits sharing CAD models,
3. supports distributed collaborative development, for example supporting versioning,
4. supports changing parametric models on the server,
5. has an open source and trusted tool stack,
6. has close integration with FreeCAD with the Lens Addon, and
7. has a community to support ongoing development.

The development plan targets three pieces of software: the Lens platform, FreeCAD itself, and the Lens Addon.

Lens platform:

• Make it deployable for developers / admins, move from AWS
• Make the code available to a developer community
• Make the tier system configurable
• Transform Lens workspace to Git LFS repositories
• Add collaboration features such as annotations, notifications
• Support showing visual file differences between versions
• Improve parameterization of models on the server

FreeCAD:

• A framework for annotations in the 3D view with a history
• Add support for Git versioning, visual file/version differences
• Include remote FreeCAD objects hosted from Lens in FreeCAD files
• Improve support for parametric design to include in Lens

Addon:

• Improve the user experience
• Support Git-based workspaces
• Support visual difference between Lens versions
• Extend FreeCAD annotations for Lens (for example user names, file versions)
• Incorporate a notification system