FreeCAD News

The FPA is launch­ing an annu­al grant pro­gram fol­low­ing last year’s research. The goal is to fos­ter rapid devel­op­ment of FreeCAD. To do that, the FPA will use the community’s dona­tions to pay devel­op­ers and non-pro­gram­ming con­trib­u­tors. We reserved a fund of 50,000 EUR for this in 2024. We aso encour­age work on items from the gen­er­al roadmap, but are also inter­est­ed in grant appli­ca­tions explor­ing oth­er possibilities.

The pro­gram has some sim­i­lar­i­ties to Google Sum­mer of Code, but it’s tar­get­ed at con­trib­u­tors who are more expe­ri­enced and don’t need much men­tor­ing (if any at all). We also rec­og­nize that projects will vary in com­plex­i­ty. Some projects will take two months to com­plete, some — half a year or more. So there will be no uni­ver­sal ‘pen­cils down’ dead­line. We will, how­ev­er, batch the review­ing of grant applications.

If you are inter­est­ed in hack­ing on FreeCAD or its ecosys­tem projects such as OCCT and Coin3D, please sub­mit your appli­ca­tion by March 29, 2024. You can find more infor­ma­tion about the grant pro­gram here. For the full guide on the pro­gram and par­tic­i­pa­tion please refer to the rule­book.

The FPA will con­tin­ue accept­ing and encour­ag­ing indi­vid­ual out-of-pro­gram grant appli­ca­tions through­out the year.