We have implemented most of what is described in the “OpenDWG” spec provided by the Open Design Alliance. How far have you progressed with it? What parts of the file formats have been reverse-engineered and what’s missing? That seems to be the case for most free software CAD tools in order to compete with the proprietary CAD tools (such as AutoCAD). Our intention is to have DWG support only on the applications that really need it. We do not like the DWG format, so we do not want to encourage its usage by simply adding DWG support to any application. Why?įelipe: The purpose of GNU LibreDWG is to enable people to read files in the DWG format without being forced to install proprietary software. Even though the situation looked somewhat scary, you started the project anyway. We contacted Felipe Sanches and Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva, developers of LibreDWG, to tell us about the status of the project and explain the state of affairs with DWG support in free software.īack in 2009 the lawsuit of Autodesk against ODA over DWG trademark was still in progress. To make sure that we have a complete and up to date understanding of the situation, we approached both LibreDWG developers, developers of end-user software and Free Software Foundation. Rather, it is best to make it clear to him what the conditions are. You should not change the license of your library. With regards to FreeCAD project and Yorik van Havre, its contributor, Richard Stallman stated: FSF who are sole copyright holders of LibreDWG objected to relicensing. It doesn’t work for end-user software, because they tend to use 3rd party components under different licenses that impose restrictions. The document used to be badly incomplete, with whole sections of essential information missing, and the PDF file was even corrupted at times. As we started figuring out why it happened, several reasons presented themselves, two of them being really outstanding. The project had a rapid start, but came to a halt in early 2011 with just a single free software project (GRASS) adopting it and lack of support for newer file format versions. Later, in 2009, several Brazilian developers started a new project called LibreDWG that derived its initial code base from libdwg, a formerly abandoned attempt to fix the lack of a free library for handling DWG files. In 2008, Free Software Foundation acknowledged the issue and gave it a high priority. Even so, we are talking about proprietary software that’s controlled by a single vendor. Rise and shine of DraftSight, a 2D drafting application from Dassault Systems, changed the situation for the better last year due to its support for DWG and lack of a price tag.

None of them makes free software compatible SDK, and that seriously complicates work of some free software developers. The Open Design Alliance camp has a publicly available spec. The Autodesk camp doesn’t make any public documentation on DWG. Until fairly recently proprietary software vendors that make use of the file format had been arguing over DWG trademark infringements, and these days they are basically in two camps. The overall situation with DWG is far from being healthy. That effectively prevents free CAD applications from being much used to accomplish real life tasks. Within those workflows if you can’t read and save DWG, you can’t get the job done. While file formats such as STEP (ISO 10303) exist, DWG is still part of far too many production workflows. Over decades it has become a kind of de-facto standard in some industries that heavily rely on CAD software. Having been asked recently about reasons for lack of DWG support in free software, we started digging and very nearly fell into a pitch black abyss.Īs pretty much every engineer knows, DWG is the native file format of various applications by Autodesk since 1982.

Librecad block library