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SKETCHUP GOES SUBSCRIPTION
In the comments you can read things like: "It's fine. I already moved to Blender..." :)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vurDzLZqjds&t=56s
Comments
Glad to see Trimble supports the OSArch movement :)
Ha - More than 3/4 of the comments are about moving to blender. With Sun position being resurrected, the CAD Transform plugin, the soon to be Extrude Intersect Dissolve tool it seems like most of the features that people are used to in SketchUp are in Blender. I started using SketchUp in 2006 when it was googlized and it seemed so full of possibility. It was free and there were a lot of people creating free plugins that got it to do the things that the core program didn't. But those things never seemed to get Incorporated and I wonder if there were legal issues around incorporating them and that put them in a bit of a bind not being able to legally use the most straightforward solutions. I think that it is interesting that, if I a getting this right, Blender has it's API in GPL so in order to make a plugin it has to be GPL compatible but that is a legal parameter and the social parameter is that people seem to respect the wishes of the creator around charging for the plugin etc creating a virtuous cycle. I think there are some lessons with Sketchup about getting behind and volunteering for a proprietary solution particularly once it was sold to Trimble where it just stagnated for years and then slowly the free version was gutted.
I'm not such strict
I believe in the future is open source, but it doesn't mean you should develop free of charge tools
If the software is commercial but has a fair price and many are happy to pay, and is open source I call it open source
Even open-source projects need to spend the value on them, this value can be time or money or anything valuable
Even Blender needs money to survive, and improve
This becomes even more vital when a tool is about "cutting edge technologies" when there're few who can lead and develop and compete and survive
Let the subscribing distrbutors Sketchup and Revit have a good fight! Good for competition, especially for development Revit which is soooo sloooow..
This means latent demand for professional caliber drawing output and architectural modeling in Blender is about to explode. This is really fantastic news for open source developers.
Similarly to @Moult's BlenderBIM vs. Revit page, someone should do a Blender for architecture vs. other closed source options comparison table - @duncan this would be good web content.
Here's a few features to list:
(PS. It could be easiest to manage this sort of thing with github and github pages, or a wiki. Just ideas!)