Translations:History/4/en

"The FreeCAD project was started by me in January 2001, as a so called GOM (Graphical Object Modeler), with the idea to use Qt, Python and Cas.CADE, an commercial CAD-Kernel that time I used in Daimler's projects. Cas.CADE gone open source shortly before, so the time seemed right to try a move in the, at that time, empty space of open source CAD. I had a two year experience with OpenCascade in a project called QSpect in which, at the end, I was the main software designer. I learned a lot about 3D and CAD programming. I also was influenced by Catia V5 and its very special user and programming interface… In March 17 2002, within the OpenCascade Project, I registered the software as FreeCAD. I couldn't think of a better name, I'm very bad on names… In April 2003, Werner Meyer, one of the colleges in the QSpect project, switched to a company called Imetric. The contact to Imetric resulted very promising since they searched for a new 3D software platform for their 3D sensors. In 2005, Imetric donated most of its Mesh Module to FreeCAD and the Open Source community, and since then they used FreeCAD as basis for their sensor system software. Since that time, Werner Meyer is a very active developer of FreeCAD. In 2005, after one year of struggle, I decided to rip of the OpenCascade document framework and replace it with an own implementation. So, at the end, we only use the CAD kernel of OpenCascade and not the rest of its Framework. 2007 was another interesting milestone. We switched to QT4 and, therefore, to the LGPL. At that time we did much work, mainly Werner."