CADtools - alpha release (for 2.49)

[migius]

@dfro

migius,

I would like to humbly offer a few ideas on getting paid.

If you want to make money doing this, I think you should put an automated donate button on your site that makes it very easy for people to contribute. You might want to check out how the guys at Ardour (digital audio recording/editing software) are trying to get paid. They ask professionals that are using Ardour to contribute a monthly donation to keep development continuing. They also have a pledge area for functions that people want. As the pledge amount increases, the developers get more excited about adding the function. There is also a graph that shows whether the main developer is making a decent living this month. It really gets the point across to the professionals using the software.

I am sure there are some other standard ways that people are getting their FOSS projects funded. Google Summer of Code?

I think the “e-mail for the scripts” idea is a bottle neck. The world will love you for openly sharing these tools. You will be the Linus Torvalds of Blender CAD functionality. I think what you are doing is so important to Blender that you should be included on their team (that means you should get some money from the Blender Foundation).

Start a forum where we can all rant about the CAD functions we want added or improved. For example, trying to use Blender’s snap tool to accurately position an object drives me crazy. On the forum have a section about what human factors, ergonomics, functionality, etc should be copied from other programs - like Rhino and Modo.

Make the website look more interesting. Give us screen shots and videos. Draw us into the excitement of what you are doing next. Have a CADtools gallery.

Tell others what you are doing. Have you told Allan Brito at www.blender3darchitect.com about your project? I am sure he would love to do a write-up on your progress.

Put some advertising on your site. Create some members only tutorials on how to use the CADtools like at Blender Cookie.

It seems to me that getting paid as a developer in FOSS projects means doing a lot more that writing great code - you have to build a community of people that are excited about what you are doing. I know I am excited about what you are doing.

Thanks,
Dave

Hi Dave,
thank you very much for your feedback and ideas.

I am familiar with these ideas already, though I see no chance to realize them now.
All my time goes into programing and bug fixing to make the script ready for beta release. I make a great progress but it consumes an incredible much time.
This is also the ground the manual and feature videos are not ready yet and the project homepage is so minimalistic.
Blog-scenario is not realistic: although I am working on my English, it is still not efficient enough for regular reports about my activities and project’s progress - it would take to much time.

In opposite to my previous projects I decided to start an alternative developing model for CADtools, with the hope to get more feedback and financial support from users.
It bases on non-anonymous relations, means i have individual contact to each user.
Registration obstacle is the method to get in contact to people really interested in.
I am all for open source software but found no better method to motivate people to get in contact with me than keeping sources closed and offering binaries only for registered users.
And it works - the feedback is better than for DXF-scripts. The financial part doesn’t work, but i hope it will change with publication of beta version.

I don’t think current Blender community is able to finance CAD extension for Blender (see our efforts for Nurbana integration: link1, link2), because there are too few users really interested in CAD and even they are not in the position to pay much for it (students, hobbyists). The point is to get more professional CAD users on board.

I have contacted Bart at BlenderNations and Allan at Blender3dArchitect already, but asked them not to publicize about CADtools until i have a stable beta. The problem is: beta should have a working UNDO functionality, but Blender’s UNDO function “doesn’t like” some python scripts, mine inclusive. I am trying to figure it out since a long time and I really don’t know how long it will take to fix it.

migius