I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
0 propertiary software is possible when you do programming, IT etc. but not for a mechanical engineer, who needs AutoCAD, Inventor, Catia, Abaqus, etc. I know that there are FOSS alternatives, but they are far less developed, since producing such a software requires hundreds of people and many many hours of work. Such a software could be made by large state owned enterprises, which would make the code public, but rather not by few hobbyst in their spare time.
As a machinist, I try to get away with FreeCAD as much as I can. I have access to Solidworks, Creo, MasterCAM, and Esprit at work, as long as the engineers aren’t hogging all of the seats. I prefer modeling in FreeCAD though. It is what I am able to practice at home. (I have a cracked copy of Creo, but the crack only works on Windows).
I do still have to feed this through Esprit for the CAM portion of my work though. FreeCAD’s CAM workbench is pretty much limited to routing and 3 axis milling at the moment. No turning, and definitely no wire EDM (what I normally do). That said, Esprit is fucking garbage and I have no doubt FreeCAD has the potential to do this better.
FreeCAD isn’t wonderful at assemblies. I generally work on a component level, and this isn’t an issue for me, but the learning curve only gets steeper if you are trying to design intricate assemblies.
None the less. I’ve used it to reverse engineer several replacement parts which remain in service, and used it to create the toolpath for one CNC program which is being used in production. I also edit my G-Code in Emacs.
IMO, the problem isn’t that free software is incapable. The problem is if you are running an engineering / manufacturing firm you need to use software which is fully compatible with what your clients use. This is a constantly moving target which even commercial offerings struggle with. If your client designs a skyscraper in AutoCAD, you literally have no choice but to use AutoCAD. It doesn’t matter how good the AutoCAD importer is in SolidWorks. Something in your massive assembly is going to break, or you are going to waste a bunch of mechanical engineering resources trying to solve what is effectively an information technology problem.
Of course, this doesn’t touch on the CNC controller firmware at all, which, in production, is uniformly proprietary. Predominantly FANUC controls, with some Citizen, Charmilles, Mitsubishi, and Makino sprinkled in. FANUC in particular has grown to be a pain in the ass to maintain, as they’ve been locking down as much shit as possible to combat cloned hardware. In practice, this only makes life more miserable for the shops purchasing genuine hardware to keep their machines running. At least if the Charmilles sinker EDM dies for good, I’ll still be able to play Doom on it until the riggers take it away.
Thank you for this knowledgeable answer comrade. I am by no means professional machine engineer, as you are, but sometimes I need to look at complicated pipework assembly, covered by few layers of sheets and tanks, in the STP format. This is very easy in Inventor, I suppose that with Catia it is very easy too, but I am unable to do it with FreeCAD. Maybe I am not skilled enough. Certainly, as you write, FreeCAD is not so well in assemblies. But quality of software is composed also from ease of use.
I certainly agree. When the client or enterprise you cooperate with uses DWG format (as is the case most of times), you cannot use, etc., librecad.
There are many other cases, for example Matlab, editors for programmable logic controllers, software for industrial robots, etc.
Therefore, in such cases, I think the pragmatic solution under capitalism is to pirate such software. In the end, this is a mean of production and we just need to seize it. But under communism, such software could be made by state owned enterprises and the code could be available at least within all communist states.