[jwagenet]

The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.

[JoshTriplett]

On a scale from "big chunk of work" to "complete rewrite", how much work would it take to fix those issues in Open Cascade?

[throwup238]

It would probably fall somewhere between "substantial architectural overhaul" and "partial rewrite" because it’d require redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges.

Some of these issues are long standing and really hard to solve. Someone could probably defend an entire PhD thesis on “redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges” without making much practical progress

[KeplerBoy]

> fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons

I can't recall a single CAD system which did this differently. Has modern solidworks figured this out?

[bsder]

Sandia seems to have some form of kernel, but only Federal-associated entities can get access to it.

It would be interesting to see if they would license that out further for some amount of money.

[bgoated01]

If you're referring to Cubit, they license the ACIS kernel under the hood.