Professional Quality CAD on Linux with DraftSight (Linux.com)

IMHO It's a foot in the door, and a welcome first step.

FOSS software should be using the open standard DGN format not reading and writing the horribly proprietary DWG format. I'm not opposed to converters that allow the import and export because interoperability is important, but any FOSS program should not be natively using DWG.

I've qcad to be a fine tool for my needs (drew building plans for my new house, for authority approval), and I've found the DXF format in latest qcad only works in autocad 2004 version though.

But I've heard from several autocad users, that they often have problems with older projects - not working in newer autocad versions etc. - so it's autocad who keeps changing the game appearently.

I don't know how "standard" DWG is in this aspect.

The article says that LibreDWG is a long way from a release, but my experience is that's it actually works quite well for reading DWG files. The problem is that nothing uses the library, so it is of limited use on its own. QCAD/libreCAD using libreDWG would be extremely useful, because it's true that a lot of manufacturer-provided drawings are now DWG-only. I have no idea hard it would be to get libreCAD to read DWGs, but I hope someone gets enthused to do that work soon. I've package libreDWG for Debian. Needs a little more love then it can be uploaded.

Of course what we really want is 3D CAD so you can't accidentally make a building where the plan doesn't match up with the elevations. I did try doing CAD in blender, but it was pretty painful as blender was never really designed as a CAD tool. brlCAD was just too scary and complicated - it may be _really_ good, but again probably only in 1980's kind of way.

Something with the user interface from sketchup would be great for most people. It has issues too, but for many tasks it's brilliant, and the cloud-sourcing of subcomponents is a really useful concept. But again sketchup is proprietary software that can only be run on linux using wine (and I can't get the new version going at all) and the format is proprietary too (SFAIK), so that's no good.

The building-design area is desperately in need of a good dose of free-software. There are lots of sums that needs doing, many of them very easy which could be integrated into some Building Information Management software, with an online database of products, and using CAD tools to draw up shapes and layouts. The whole area is wide-open for some commoditisation, and I'd be very keen to get together with other like-minded souls to make something happen. I have a selection of evil spreadsheets that need turning into real software for structural calcs, heating design, energy efficiency and thermal analysis. There is some free software in this area, such as ESP-r which does 2D thermal calcs (but I've found it hard to even build, never mind use). It needs packaging...

Here's hoping for some more fundamental progress than freeware DWG-reading apps (nice as that is).