The FreeCAD project was started around 2002 by two German engineers, Jürgen Riegel and Werner Mayer. It was very ambitious. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) world was, and still is, dominated by a few high-level commercial applications that have large teams of developers behind them.
The event that made it possible to create an open source professional-grade CAD application was the open sourcing of the OpenCasCade library, a powerful 3D modeling kernel, which is a core component of FreeCAD. After that, very clever ideas about how a modern CAD application should behave and be developed helped it evolve to its present form. Although it still cannot compete with its commercial counterparts, it begins to be very useful for small CAD projects.
I discovered the project around 2006, watched it for some time, then began to write some scripts for it, and in 2008 I officially joined the development team. The community of developers, users, and enthusiasts around the project is now growing faster than ever; this helps the project to reach higher development speed and quality level, and it is thrilling to see now the first steps of FreeCAD in the professional world.
I have also known Dan Falck for a long time, from the old mailing lists, when we were all desperately looking for ways to do CAD work on the Linux platform. Dan is a well-known figure of the Linux, CAD, and CNC world, and worked a lot on HeeksCAD, a very close cousin of FreeCAD, also based on the OpenCasCade kernel. Along the road, Dan got more and more involved with FreeCAD too, contributing several additions to the FreeCAD project, and has many more ideas in the drawer.
A little bit later, from the HeeksCAD and CNC community also came the famous Brad Collette (known as Sliptonic, in the open source CADCAM world). These are two heavyweights of the open source CAD world, and no book about FreeCAD could have had better authors.
Yorik van Havre
FreeCAD developer
