We are shutting down Ondsel | Ondsel
We are shutting down Ondsel | Ondsel
After operating for almost two years, Ondsel has made the difficult decision to cease operations and close down.
It was a pleasure using it. I wanted to switch from Fusion to Ondsel and tried to learn it as an alternative.
Did you use Ondsel?
It is really sad to see them leave. They were one of the best open source citizens I know. We only have 1.0 today because of them (and many other contributors).
I was always sceptical about them having a valuable business model. And I thought they'd have bigger pockets. Becaue IMO FC/Ondsel is only now starting to get usable enough for anyone whose time is measured in $ per hour. Paying 1000 $ for a license is not much, if it saves your worker only 1 hour each week. Just yesterday I had troubles importing a step file into FC. Some worked two didn't. Ondsel could import them. That's when I read the sad news...
It was a cool project, but it never seemed like a good business model.
Until just now I had never heard of this team and their contribution to FreeCAD. Reading the article I think it outlines what they did and it sounds excellent.
As far as their success or failure of achieving their aims, I don't have any information to make a judgement either way.
I will say that making a business out of open source software is not something for the faint of heart and not something that has a track record of success, let alone a documented one. Mostly it seems to follow the pattern: "How do you make a small fortune from open source?" "Start with a large fortune."
I say this as a quarter century user, developer and advocate of open source solutions.
I reaaaly hoped they would have survived longer. I used it a few times and its a huge improvement to fc, and as far as I know the team contributed quite a lot to essential improvements to get fc to v1.0 Fc is still a difficult software to use, and I wished ondsel could continue to improve it in the correct direction. But well, maybe it will get better soon. I'm thankful for their work either way
I had tried FC a few times previously, and wasn't able to make it work for me, but I'm actively using the newest release candidate now. I think it's finally over the hump where a lot more people are going to start adopting it. That should fuel continued development.
Seems like just rebranding a free and open source software and try to run a business with it, isn't the right way when you don't make any significant optimizations to said software, except some minor UI tweaks.
To be fair, they also made a number of fixes and improvements in the base code itself and like good Free Software citizens, contributed them back to the project. Those contributions are in the current 1.0RC2 release of FreeCAD. I think they were wanting to try the same play that launched RedHat back in the day. I appreciate their contributions and I'm sorry it didn't work out for them.