FreeCAD News

Two active FreeCAD con­trib­u­tors, Louis Gombert (Lgt2x) and Thomas Duch­esne (pier­re­porte), recent­ly attend­ed the Journées du Logi­ciel Libre con­fer­ence in Lyon to give a talk about FreeCAD. This is their report.

On May 30^th and 31^st, the Journées du Logi­ciel Libre (Free Soft­ware Days) or JdLL, one of France’s longest-run­ning Free and Open Source Soft­ware events, took place on the cam­pus of the pres­ti­gious École Nor­male Supérieure. The event brought togeth­er dozens of projects, asso­ci­a­tions, and speak­ers ded­i­cat­ed to open-source soft­ware, tech­nol­o­gy, and dig­i­tal commons.

Among the many pre­sen­ta­tions, two FreeCAD con­trib­u­tors, Louis Gombert (Lgt2x) and Thomas Duch­esne (pier­re­porte), gave a talk about the cur­rent state of the FreeCAD project.

The pre­sen­ta­tion began with an overview of the lat­est devel­op­ments in FreeCAD, high­light­ing some of the most notable improve­ments and new fea­tures intro­duced in the 1.1 releas­es, and a few sam­ples of what will come next. The speak­ers then pro­vid­ed insight into how the project is orga­nized, its gov­er­nance, devel­op­ment work­flow, and the roles played by con­trib­u­tors across dif­fer­ent areas of the ecosystem.

The final part of the talk focused on the chal­lenges fac­ing the project as it con­tin­ues to grow. Top­ics includ­ed com­mu­ni­ty coor­di­na­tion, main­te­nance of a large code base, onboard­ing new con­trib­u­tors, and ensur­ing the long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty of a major open-source CAD platform.

The ses­sion attract­ed strong inter­est from atten­dees, and the room was near­ly full through­out the pre­sen­ta­tion. The audi­ence engaged active­ly with the speak­ers, ask­ing ques­tions and dis­cussing both tech­ni­cal and com­mu­ni­ty-relat­ed aspects of the project.

After the talk, sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants stayed to con­tin­ue the dis­cus­sion in a more infor­mal set­ting. Some expressed an inter­est in con­tribut­ing to the code base, while oth­ers shared pos­i­tive feed­back about recent FreeCAD devel­op­ments. Among the fea­tures men­tioned was the DFM work­bench, which, although still dis­trib­uted as an add-on, has already gen­er­at­ed enthu­si­asm among users.

Events such as JdLL pro­vide valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect with the broad­er open-source com­mu­ni­ty, meet cur­rent and future users, and encour­age new con­trib­u­tors to get involved. The con­ver­sa­tions that fol­lowed the pre­sen­ta­tion demon­strat­ed the grow­ing inter­est in FreeCAD and its ecosys­tem, and we hope that some of the peo­ple we met in Lyon will soon become active mem­bers of the community.

A final note would not be com­plete with­out men­tion­ing the excel­lent cater­ing pro­vid­ed dur­ing the event. Lyon is wide­ly regard­ed as the gas­tro­nom­ic cap­i­tal of France, and the food more than lived up to expectations.

Many thanks to the JdLL orga­niz­ers, vol­un­teers, and atten­dees for a suc­cess­ful event, and we look for­ward to future oppor­tu­ni­ties to present FreeCAD to new audiences!

For those who could not attend, the pre­sen­ta­tion record­ing is avail­able on videos-libr.es. You can find the slides here: https://slides.f4mkg.fr/jdll26/.