On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Robert Davis, AIA wrote: > As a professional who makes a living with CAD, I just want the most > robust CAD solution available on Linux. To my knowledge, there are no > native Linux CAD solutions suitable for architecture. The type of > license is less important to me than the ability to transition entirely > to Linux and be freed from Microsoft. > This is a very understandable short-term goal. But CAD on Linux can only become a serious competitor to the existing CAD vendors if and only if a well-designed open source project comes into existence. (Or if those vendors release their products for Linux.) Otherwise, one completely misses the power of the open source community, and the alternative is another lock-in into one single vendor. Whether this lock-in takes place on Windows or Linux is totally irrelevant. We have experienced the costs of this lock-in times and again: we do research to advance some aspects of CAD (and CAE), but are forced to work together with one single vendor, because we need access to some internals of the code; however, with the next release of the software, we cannot access anything anymore, and we even have to pay for the updates we contributed to ourselves. (Minus academic discounts.) Just my 0.02 Euro cents :-) Herman -- K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group <http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480