Yorik van Havre has announced LinesCAD, a new side project exploring a simpler free software BIM and 2D CAD application. The first public code is a proof-of-concept IFC viewer in a single Python file, using IfcOpenShell, Pivy/Coin3D, and PySide/Qt to open IFC files without FreeCAD’s OpenCASCADE and C++ application stack. ...
FreeCAD and BRL-CAD are both participating in Google Summer of Code 2026. GSoC remains one of the more practical ways for new contributors to enter established free software projects: applicants work with mentors on scoped development projects, while the host communities get focused time on features, refactoring, documentation, testing, and tooling that can otherwise be hard to fund. ...
The FreeCAD Project Association has opened applications for its Q2 2026 grant program. The 2026 program uses a smaller quarterly budget of 10,000 EUR, limits developers to one grant application per quarter, and is focusing more strongly on documentation, testing, release-cycle improvements, bug fixing, and permanent positions. ...
The FreeCAD Project Association has launched its first community design contest, partnering with UK open science hardware company Labcrafter. The contest asks participants to design an open hardware pinch valve, with the full brief and entry process hosted on the FreeCAD forum. ...
FreeCAD 1.1.1 has been released shortly after version 1.1.0. The FreeCAD announcement describes it as a maintenance release with a large number of small fixes, with the full release notes and changelog available from the GitHub release page. ...
FreeCAD 1.1 has been released, bringing another substantial update after the 1.0 milestone. The release includes transparent Part Design previews, interactive draggers for tools such as Fillet and Chamfer, 3 point lighting, a Clarify Selection tool, Assembly and FEM improvements, animations, and a new CAM tool library system. ...
The Castle Game Engine is a free, open source, cross-platform (desktop, mobile, console, web) 3D and 2D game engine. It comes with a powerful visual editor and support for open standards like glTF, X3D, … and now IFC - a key open standard used in BIM. ...
Last week, a new stable release of FreeCAD has been published, tagged 0.21. This release is mostly there to provide a stable point before implementing Toponaming resolution functionality. Toponaming is how we call the problem of unstable reference names in FreeCAD (Edge1 might become Edge5 after a shape recompute), it is the last big issue the development team wants to solve before deeming FreeCAD good for the mythical 1.0 release. ...
Imagine GIT for IFC files. That is, imagine a tool that keeps track of changes to an IFC file over the duration of a design project–a tool that allows branching or forking of different design options from a distributed team, and tool that can asynchronously merge these revisions together. ...
Google Summer of Code is an annual programme that helps students and those new to open source software make their first steps into contributing code to software projects. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors. ...