Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

Posted Mar 13, 2023 13:42 UTC (Mon) by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
In reply to: Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association by vadim
Parent article: Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

It's a bit surprising that projects choose to go their own way for organizational structuring. I'd expect that it would be easier to just pick one of the established umbrella projects or open financial hosting services for such things. Say something like sfconservancy.org, apache.org, eclipse.org, or linuxfoundation.org.

Now, the interview mentions some objections to that, f.x code contributor agreements. But surely there are project services that does not requre such things?

My point is that homegrown foundations requires more review for funders too. That friction can be reduced by having a parent or hosting organization with established trust.

I don't intend to pick on Freecad in particular. It's great that CAD software for Linux have matured to the point that we now have several matyure and competing projects.

Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

Posted Mar 13, 2023 18:38 UTC (Mon) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]

Well, I imagine, in some cases projects are already larger than any hosting organization. And sometimes, a project grows out of the hosting organization, Godot being one of such cases. They "graduated" from SFC late last year and now have a foundation of their own.

> Godot joined the SFC when the project was still in its infancy and its needs were fairly limited. Now the Godot project is many times larger, it employs multiple people, and it has more complex needs and aspirations. Accordingly, as the project continues to grow even more, it makes sense to have the control, independence, and flexibility in managing funds of an organization that is solely focused on Godot.

You can read more about that in their announcement: https://godotengine.org/article/godots-graduation-godot-m...

Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

Posted Mar 14, 2023 9:23 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, the main objection I can think of is that the four organisations you mention are all in the US. If most of the main developers are in Europe then it's annoying if the administration happens half a world away. I haven't been able to find a similar kind of umbrella organisation in Europe (several that do advocacy, but not administration).

It's fairly easy to manage the accounts of a small association yourself. It's not a huge amount of work, but it's not nothing either. The issues are mostly around bus factor and what do you do if the person doing most of the administrative work decides to do something else instead?

Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

Posted Mar 14, 2023 19:51 UTC (Tue) by vadim (subscriber, #35271) [Link] (1 responses)

We (Overte e.V.) are indeed mostly EU based.

Interview: the FreeCAD Project Association

Posted Mar 16, 2023 7:45 UTC (Thu) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

While I believe they were originaly USA based, Eclipse have moved to Europe. Specifically they are nowdays a Belgian incorporated international not-for-profit association.