History

History
Jürgen Riegel started working on what would become FreeCAD in January 2001. CAS.CADE, a commercial software development framework including a geometric modeling kernel (or CAD kernel), had been released under an open source license in 2000 and renamed Open Cascade. This made the realisation of an open source 3D CAD program possible, as having to program a CAD kernel from scratch would have required a huge amount of work.

At first the project was called GOM (Graphical Object Modeler), and along with Open Cascade, the Qt application framework and the Python programming language were to be used.

The project was registered on SourceForge on 17 March 2002 under the name FreeCAD. In 2005, through the participation of Werner Mayer, code was donated and open sourced by the company Imetric, and was the foundation of the Mesh module. Werner Mayer joined the FreeCAD project the same year. Also in 2005, the Open Cascade document framework was replaced by the project's own implementation. From then on, only the CAD kernel portion of Open Cascade would be used.

Yorik van Havre joined the project in 2008 and started work on the Draft module. Before that point, there was no way to create 2D geometry through the GUI. This module was programmed entirely in Python rather than in C++, the core language used in FreeCAD. This proved that Python integration was a success and could be used to extend or customize FreeCAD's capabilities. In addition to his work on the Draft module, Yorik worked on expanding the FreeCAD documentation, and became FreeCAD's de facto "Art director", creating many icons for FreeCAD's GUI and defining their style.

In 2009, FreeCAD was accepted as a Debian package in the Debian repositories. FreeCAD was added to the Ubuntu repositories in 2010. In 2011, taking the opportunity given by the Launchpad online platform, the FreeCAD Maintainers team was created to provide daily build packages of FreeCAD to users of the Ubuntu operating system.

Release history

 * Legend

Links

 * SourceForge Files section
 * SourceForge Old Files section
 * Who is behind FreeCad? topic on the FreeCAD forum