QCAD Pro and QCAD Community

Use this forum for all posts and questions about the free QCAD Community Edition version 3

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Duncan Lithgow
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Posts: 13
Joined: Sat Jan 25, 2020 5:00 pm

QCAD Pro and QCAD Community

Post by Duncan Lithgow » Sat Dec 19, 2020 9:01 pm

I'm a bit confused about the relationship between the development of QCAD Pro & QCAD community edition. At the moment on https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=QCAD (which I edit) it says that development of QCAD Pro supports QCAD CE - but I can't find that actually stated clearly anywhere, it's just something I've picked up. I'm very keen to support development of 2D CAD with DWG/DXF support but need to understand what I'm supporting.

The simplest answer might be "QCAD is GPLv3" but that's still not quite clear since large parts of functionality are only in the pro version and it's unclear to me if they will ever be in the CE version. Other parts will never be GPLv3 since they are proprietary to ODA (until LibreDWG turns up).

I'd love some help to understand the relationship between these two 'products'.

Matfie
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Posts: 37
Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2016 8:46 am

Re: QCAD Pro and QCAD Community

Post by Matfie » Wed Dec 23, 2020 12:44 pm

QCAD Community Edition is open source, distributed on github under the GPLv3 licence and you can compile this yourself on many operating systems (I use it on NetBSD)

QCAD Pro (and QCAD/CAM) is based on the same sources but with closed source binary extensions, which are included as time-limited modules in the trial versions provided for Windows, Mac and Linux which you can download from qcad.org and you can buy a licence to unlock that limitation, or simply remove the relevant files and use QCAD as the Community Edition.

Andrew Mustun is Ribbonsoft and the main developer for QCAD and licence payments are payments to him and therefore support the development of QCAD CE though it is not clear to me if this is mainly going to be bugfixes or if future features will also make their way into the CE version.

From your page, strictly speaking LibreCAD is based on a fork of QCAD v2. QCAD was almost completely rewritten for v3.

you also mentioned LibreDWG and I guess because Andrew is already a member of ODA or at least licenses the Teigha library for QCAD Pro he would have to look at if he wanted to trade any other benefits he gets from that against free .dwg IO or even including it in QCAD CE (as this is one of the features which incentivises the Pro purchase)

Duncan Lithgow
Junior Member
Posts: 13
Joined: Sat Jan 25, 2020 5:00 pm

Re: QCAD Pro and QCAD Community

Post by Duncan Lithgow » Mon Dec 28, 2020 1:42 pm

Thanks Matfie for touching on all the relevant points in my original question. I hope Andrew will join in with a comment.

Regarding LibreDWG support I would hope Andrew sees the advantages for CE in particular and his users as well in promoting transparency in read/write of DWG files. Andrew wrote back in 2011 that adding support for LibreDWG was a possibility in the future as it became more stable viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1265&hilit=libredwg . Either way it would be great if someone added support for LibreDWG to QCAD CE.

I have begun encouraging LibreCAD to do this https://github.com/LibreCAD/LibreCAD_3/issues/207 and begun documenting DWG support in FOSS on https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Drawing_(DWG)

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