the libre software ecosystem
Here's the opinion of someone who thinks more about the ecosystem of solutions than the individual solutions, that would be me.
One thing I think is so often a missed opportunity in early stage FOSS projects is collaboration on code base. In my mind the best solution must be generic libraries (preferably in a popular high level language) that are easy to integrate into applications. This focuses efforts and skills and makes it easier for end users to find a small number of implementations in (preferably) popular applications. Now, I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on any specific project and the pros & cons, but .dxf & .dwg support are classic examples of a fractured solution with a lot of incomplete implementations. Likewise the proliferation of implementations of libraries for handling IFC data. Of course sometimes a different programming language may be a prerequisite for implementing some specific solution.
For me personally I live in a co-op and support the political cause of employee & customer ownership of businesses & infrastructure. So this is not some passing thought I had riding the bus home. OSArch for me is an extension of this principle. Power to the users & cooperation whenever it makes sense.
So how much of this makes sense to you? Am I missing an important perspective?
Comments
100% agree. This is a fundamental aspect of how I write code - so I do the best where I can.
All of the code in the BlenderBIM Add-on that deals with IFC is split into the IfcOpenShell API, and can be used by any application. For anyone attempting to build a native IFC application, it basically gives you all the batteries you need to build it very, very fast.
All of the little utilities, like clash detection, model comparison (diff), CSV editing, patching, BIMTester, BCF, bSDD, COBie, IfcFM, etc are all designed to work as a generic library, which uses Python as a popular high level language. In theory, all of these can be reused anywhere. In practice, only BIMTester has been used in FreeCAD. Same like how we're approaching drawing generation - anybody can use it.
Also in practice, these smaller utilities and the API have helped a lot of people reuse the code directly where otherwise they would've had to redo the work from scratch.
I'm not alone in this either. When I see the collaboration between Topologic, Sverchok, Homemaker, and Ladybug Tools, I see the same code sharing and collaboration.
I guess the DWG situation was a bit of a sad situation which I don't know the details of.