Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

The sustainability of free software continues to be mostly uncharted waters. No team is the same as any other, so copying, say, the Blender Foundation’s approach to governance will, most likely, not work for other projects. But there is value in understanding how various non-commercial organizations operate in order to make informed decisions for the governance of new ones. In late 2021, the FreeCAD team launched the FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) to handle the various assets that belong to this free 3D CAD project. In this interview, Yorik van Havre, a longtime FreeCAD developer — and current president of the Association — guides us through the process of starting and managing the FPA.

The genesis of the FPA

Alex: Let’s start with the basics: what is the FreeCAD Project Association, where is its headquarters, and who are the Association's members?

Yorik: The FPA is a non-profit association aimed at supporting the FreeCAD project and its developers. It is based in Brussels, Belgium, where I live (in fact, its address is my home address). It is composed of about 15 veteran members and developers of the FreeCAD community, of which four are administrators. I am currently one of these four administrators as well as the FPA president We are elected by the FPA members for a period of two years.

FPA members are currently the founding members plus a few more that came along afterwards. We have intentionally not decided yet how new people could become members, because we still have no clear idea of what would be efficient.

Alex: How did the team arrive at the decision to create the Association?

Yorik: There are two main reasons that led us to creating the FPA. One was the growing desire of the community to contribute financially to FreeCAD and to "do something with money". It might sound easy, once people are ready to donate money, but it's not. Unless you live in a fiscal haven, anyone receiving money, be it donation or work revenue, is subject to taxes. So we couldn't just receive money. It would mean the person receiving it would have a lot of taxes to pay, even if that person would only redistribute it afterwards. So we needed a structure that is able to hold that money and is not tied to any of us. Also, spending money properly and responsibly involves some work.

There is an increasing number of platforms and organizations, such as OpenCollective, Liberapay, or the Free Software Conservancy, that can do that part for you. So this reason alone would probably not be good enough to create a non-profit for an open-source project. Of course, there are downsides to these platforms: some will require transferring the code ownership to them (I personally would advise against that), most will take a percentage of earnings, and using the money is often a bit more restrictive than using your own bank account. Nevertheless, these platforms are certainly a great way to start.

The second reason is that, in the past years, we have seen a growing number of misuses or misappropriations of FreeCAD. We have concerns that it might get "stolen" from us by any company willing to put up some money to obtain things like trademarks, web domains, etc. Of course, community-developed open-source code like FreeCAD itself cannot be stolen, but we wouldn't like to see all the effort we've put into making it known be taken from us. In short, we wanted a way to be able to say: "this is the real, official FreeCAD".

Alex: Team members in the FreeCAD project come from all over the world. Why Belgium?

Yorik: Since I was the one willing to put some effort in creating that non-profit, and I live in Belgium, we naturally looked at what Belgium offered. The Belgian law offers several types of non-profit structures: foundations, classical (national) associations, and international associations. When we saw that last one, we thought: that's clearly for us!

It's worth mentioning that almost every EU country offers similar structures, with similar benefits and hassles. The Belgian international association type does not even require any of the members to be Belgian or actually live in Belgium, so this looked perfect to us. A foundation inherently means "people wanting to put money into a project", while association means "people wanting to associate to pursue a project", and the latter seemed to suit better what we wanted to do. There were a lot of things we wanted to do, for which the association could be useful: organizing courses, working with companies and institutions, etc.

The FPA and the FreeCAD community

Alex: Was there any reluctance to start the Association? Or fears among developers?

Yorik: Not really from the members themselves, we were all overwhelmingly on the same page. But the FreeCAD community is nowadays very large. A process like creating an association would never have succeeded if we had done that by opening a wide discussion with the entire community. Each and every person would have different ideas over the form that this association should take and, like many similar cases, it would never happen. So, a few developers and I explained to the community our intent to create such a structure, but we basically did it between us and presented the results to the community afterwards.

Alex: What was their response?

Yorik: Some in the community of course felt hurt they weren't included. But we took great care to design the FPA to not be a "ruling body" over FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a community-developed project, where anybody has their say, and all of us thought the FPA should actually help to protect that and not overrule anything. So in the FPA statutes, which is a kind of a constitution of a non-profit, we introduced clear barriers that would prevent the FPA from ruling over anything in FreeCAD. We wanted it to be a practical, helper structure to the project that all the community could use and benefit from, and not a ruling body. I think the community understood the idea well, and I believe everybody is basically happy with it now.

Alex: Who is currently managing the FPA?

Yorik: Myself and three other administrators do most of the work, and the rest of the members vote. We are still setting things up, though. We are only beginning to actually spend money. I expect things to ramp up this year, and there will probably be work for more people.

Alex: What kind of work are you thinking of?

Yorik: Organize projects where money could be spent. That can include organizing events, FreeCAD presentations, or things like courses. Most of all, we would like to spend money on coding. But you cannot just throw money and have code magically being written. You need to go after interested people, write proper work proposals, verify the results, etc. We are busy writing guidelines for all this, but basically the FPA is open to just any proposal coming from the community.

Alex: You said earlier that not everybody was happy with the FPA, at least initially. What’s the relationship dynamics between the FPA and the FreeCAD community?

Yorik: The FPA is a side body, a helper structure, designed to help and fund the project and its developers, and also hold things in the name of the community, like trademarks, domain names, etc. At the moment that is the only thing it does.

We would like to make the FPA an official representative of the FreeCAD community, so that the Association would be able to speak on behalf of the entire community, for example, to universities, companies, etc. But we don't want to impose that, I think it should come naturally, it's the community who need to "elect" the FPA as its representative. We take great care to be fully transparent and open, and encourage the community to make use of the FPA's resources, so it's a mutual building of trust. Like all things in FreeCAD, it goes slowly but surely.

Running the FPA

Alex: Let’s roll back a bit. How much time did it take you to register the FPA and do the related paperwork?

Yorik: About a year. Setting up an international non-profit association requires a notarial act and registering to several government instances. We basically drafted the association statutes ourselves and hired a notary to do the rest. As a result, thanks to being in Belgium, we have a nice, impressive document signed by the King, that gave birth to the FPA.

Alex: What kind of regular paperwork do you do for the FPA and how much time does it take?

Yorik: I do a weekly recap and check all accounts for issues, and then a monthly report that goes public. Another administrator keeps a more detailed track of accounting, and we are now looking for an accountant to help us with the official yearly report. We are a very small association though. Requirements are not complex and we can do most of the work ourselves. I would say I spend myself between half a day and a day per week working on the FPA.

Alex: What do you think are FreeCAD’s most important challenges, technical and otherwise? How do you think FPA can help dealing with those?

Yorik: My own opinion (others in the FPA might have different opinions) is that we are more and more at risk to lose or weaken the community aspect of the development. FreeCAD is growing larger, interests companies more and more, and there is a push to "professionalize" the development. I'm against what that idea imposes, because we as a community are perfectly capable of producing a professional tool, in a professional way.

A good, open, transparent and fair open-source workflow is often (always?) way more professional than what happens behind the closed doors of companies. For example, from one standpoint, taking a lot of time to roll out certain features is deemed unprofessional. But from another standpoint, it is actually very professional and responsible.

We don't merge changes just because there is pressure to do so. Things take time because we want FreeCAD and the team around it to be stable. So we take great care to do things right, without disruptions. We make sure that other developers will be able to integrate changes without introducing bugs down the line. The community is a very strict and strong quality assessor.

With the FPA, we are trying to help people from outside the community to understand all this. Turn all this into a conscious, documented, written, transparent, open workflow. I think that's the big path where we can professionalize things. Make outside developers aware of how things work in the FreeCAD project. And we'll also work to keep the community-based ecosystem flourishing.

Another issue I find worrisome is the lack of diversity in the FreeCAD community. It is still very much a white male club. We already thought a lot about ways to change that, and obviously there is no magic recipe. I believe the FPA also has a role to play there by setting guidelines and mechanisms so that everybody would feel welcome and protected.

Alex: What kind of decisions do you deal with in the FPA and how do you make them? Do you do meetings, minutes, and suchlike?

Yorik: That's another advantage of working with an open-source project. We know how to keep track of changes, don't we? Basically we work the same way as we are used to: we open issues, we discuss them, we mark them as solved. Voting happens in a private room we have, as needed. We do a weekly 30-minute video chat with administrators only, and a video chat all together once in a while, but mostly for fun. Other than that, we have no formal meetings.

When we built the FPA, we decided that members should be free to vote or not, but also that a minimum of 50% of the members should vote for a vote to be valid. This quickly led to the FPA being blocked, as not enough members were voting. We ended up introducing an active/inactive system where members who didn't vote for a long time become inactive until they ask to be made active again, which solved all the problems. Things work really well now and voting is easy.

Alex: How do you decide what projects get grants and for how much?

Yorik: We take the slow lane here. None of us thought we would get so much money right away. We are still trying to scale up. So we decided on a project to give USD $1,000 grants. Just to be careful and not overspend. So far it has been easy, everybody who asked for it got the grant. So we'll actually need to scale that up. Surprisingly, it's harder to spend the money than to earn it.

Sponsorship

Alex: According to the latest annual report, FPA has over 60K euro in total. Where does the money come from mostly? Individuals? Companies?

Yorik: I'd say about 90% is coming from donations by individuals and 10% from donations by companies.

Alex: Can you see regular corporate sponsoring happening, similar to what Blender Foundation has?

Yorik: Yes, absolutely. But we also want to take great care in not becoming dependent on big companies' money and be responsible with it. So we are not really begging for it just yet, we would rather try to come up with proposals and counterparts first to make the team and the companies more like equal partners.

I want to stress this: FreeCAD is made by people, for people. It would be best if people continued considering FreeCAD is 100% theirs, not something driven by commercial players. Quite the opposite: I'd rather see the FreeCAD community being able to tell the commercial world how they would like things to be done.

Alex: What would you say are the highlights of the first year of FPA?

Yorik: Being still alive might be a good result already, but having attracted so much more money than we thought, without much guarantee yet that we would spend that well, makes me pretty happy that there is so much trust in it from the community. We also learned a lot about working together in a different, more "serious" way — being more responsible, accountable, transparent and fair at deciding for others. I think we have passed the test, and that's really thrilling.

Managing the FPA takes a lot of time, mine and others', more than we expected. And deciding what to do with the money is actually much more complicated than it looks. Most people work on FreeCAD for fun, they are not so much interested in making money there. I think most actually enjoy working on a project where no money or other commercial considerations are involved. We don't want to change anything there, we think it's precious.

But it is also a great opportunity, you know, how to do this in a good, correct, responsible way, that does not harm the people or the project.

Alex: The latest news is that Brad Colette, a long-time contributor to FreeCAD, started a public benefit company, Ondsel, with Open Core Ventures to create cloud services based on FreeCAD. Brad is also on the FPA board. What do you expect the collaboration between Ondsel, FPA, and FreeCAD to be?

Yorik: I don't have a clear picture of how the collaboration will be yet. But I trust Brad a lot. He is a responsible person, he cares a lot about the FreeCAD project and its community, so I'm sure the collaboration will be fruitful.

Our thanks to Yorik van Havre for taking the time to respond in detail about the operation of the FreeCAD Project Association.