4dpuzzle

It says ‘one of the most shameful’. There are plenty of others - especially the ones perpetrated by the devil Henry Kissinger. This shameful episode is right on character for the USA.

What’s the second problem after topo naming that’s getting fixed?

FreeCAD has already merged the solution for the infamous ‘topological naming problem’. The 1.0 release may happen soon!

You are right, except for one detail. Package managers almost always validate the packages using digital signatures, to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. You don’t need to trust the network anymore. Shell scripts piped to a shell don’t have that protection. You still have to trust the developers and maintainers, though.

One of the main factors contributing to this problem is how customers simply give up their rights for convenience. Pro-customer options don’t disappear. They die a slow painful death.

Take the example of DRM in books. All the easy options like from Amazon are DRM encumbered. But the DRM-free options are still available if you are willing to search a bit. They don’t cost much extra either. But people don’t care. And direct sellers providing DRM-free books wither away in neglect. Similar examples are still around for reparable devices, DRM-free multimedia, etc.

Consumers rights are not a given. Like any rights, those are the ones you have to defend. You have to put at least a little bit of effort to protect it. When I suggested this recently, I was accused of ‘victim-blaming’. What escape is there when the victims are not ready to fight back?

Mastodon has no privacy at all. Even if you host your own instance. People use Mastodon for freedom and to get away from manipulation by corporate social media.

The Apache to AGPL re-licensing seems OK - considering that many other projects in similar situation chose non-FOSS licenses like BSL. But CLA replacing DCO? What will prevent the project from going closed-source in the future, without the approval of the contributors? This doesn’t look good for the project.

OpenSCAD is a good take on CAD. My primary workflow is also based on plaintext (text configs, code, org-mode, latex, etc) and keyboard (no mouse). It’s easy to manage and back it up with version control tools like git. However, there are a few fields that I feel are inherently visual and need a very interactive tool. CAD is one of them. Others are 3D animation and art.

Mechanical CAD. Something like SolidWorks or Fusion 360.

FreeCAD just isn’t there yet. They’re still struggling with the topological naming problem. However, Blender was like this in the field of 3D animations. Now it’s the standard. That gives me hope for FreeCAD. Anyway, MCAD is very important. I’m learning modern C++ and the FreeCAD code base in order to contribute.

I also wish there was a better CAD kernel than OpenCASCADE.