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Petition to open the Parasolid kernel source code
michael_zeagler
Member Posts: 125 ✭✭✭
I made it for kicks and think it would be really cool, but the CAD world is its own animal. It seems like the parasolid kernel is one of the most common pieces of software out there but it's all boxed up in stuff that's licensed for industry. I try to use a parasolid export basically anywhere but "real" CAD software and it's a total bust. It's not in something like Prusa slicer/Cura, let alone something like this academic project:
https://humanshape.org/index.html#models
I don't have a clue as to how much cash Siemens must be raking in on this whole thing, but based on talks like this one on youtube it seems like the kind of operation that gets done in cooperation with industry at large anyway. It seems like it could totally work under the model of the Linux foundation where the major benefactors, not to mention contributors, are basically customers like AWS and Google.
Comments
This is a nice idea, but considering that Siemens won't even share the documentation for the Parasolid APIs publicly (licensees sign agreements to keep this under NDA), it seems unlikely that they will change their mind any time soon.
Nice ideas that no one will like are my bread and butter.
What would be the offer for Siemens? They invested probably millions/(billions?) into Parasolid, it is a very valuable asset.
The probability that the reaction to "3(+x) people from chng.it have signed a petition that they want it for free" is "brilliant, why haven't we thought of that before!" is exactly zero.
So I guess you won't be one of the signatures then.
In general it would be brilliant to have an open source alternative at the level of Parasolid. I just think that wanting it is not enough. E.g. Blender was bought off from the original owners by the community to be "freed". Perhaps there could be an offer where Siemens would actually agree. I think the sum would be very high and need a lot more enthusiasts than we needed for the Blender buy-out back then. But who knows?
In any case - good luck!
Honestly I don't think the probability has to be high for it to be worth talking about. Professional software interoperability is abyssmal. If no one talks about it at the level of professional users and it's just Linux nerds who want to optimize the UI of FreeCAD for another ten years then nothing is ever going to change in that regard. I don't know what the finances at that level of software are, but that technology being available would benefit everyone. If you look on their page they're justifiably proud that you can't reach your hand out without touching something made in the parasolid kernel.
One other thing is that the software business has come a long way since they made the first version almost 50 years ago. It could easily work under a different framework. It just has to be worth it to someone.
Most of all the closed off nature is such an obstacle. I can't even figure out what causes one part of a model to take more generation time. Onshape's generation timers are fantastic and I appreciate that. But I don't know why anything takes that amount of time. I can only assume that's because all the inner workings are proprietary and/or under NDA. Everyone loses. The workings of 3D modeling, in far more depth than where the function is in the menus, should be something any engineering student can take in college.
Will never happen in a million years, and def not worth talking about.
It stinks anyway. The one ProE/Creo uses is way better. I wish OS had chosen that one instead of parasolid.
As far as I know, PTC has never licensed their Granite kernel. When Onshape started (long before being acquired by PTC), there were only a few realistic options, and Parasolid was also what the team had used when they started Solidworks.
My honest opinion is that the likes of Siemens, and many other companies with them, are too fixed in their thinking that these types of assets need to be closed off and protected against competitors. Basically it has been shown many times over that their way of protectionist thinking is holding back the whole world, but they do not care. It is the same with the statement that advertising does not work, what works is the nice statistics that look good and that convince the producers to throw big money at it.
Also, even if you get it opensource, there will always be a new company that takes it legitemately, builds it in their stuff, change it and closes it for no one to see what they have done. For examples look at the open Klipper software for 3d printers and virtually every big chinese company producing budget 3d printers are using it now in a closed off environment.
Really I think the best for these kind of scenarios is for some interested and talented individuals to take it upon them and just do it their own way.
Yes it is slow and tedious and yes Freecad still does not work the same as some of the other slick softwares, but it is the only way. None of the big companies will be convinced it is in everybodies interest to free these things. They see it as some weird insurance which does not actually work but hey, I bet they also keep advertising!
But just occasionally, sometimes, magic does happen.
I give you this last week Electronic Arts putting Command and Conquer source code up on git. Three weeks ago that was never going to happen.
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour/blob/main/Generals/Code/Main/WinMain.cpp#L615
So it is worth talking about. Ideas have to start somewhere.
Why should it be open source? So people can mess with it in their spare time? Rather than professional software developers to make a good product? Should software people get paid for their work? CAD used to cost 10's of thousands of dollars for one engineer to have a workstation and the software, in the 1990's. Now it's $1500 per year and can run on a $500 computer, It's dirt cheap. The people that want it for free, are they going to give away their time for free when they design stuff on it? Are they going to give away their products for free that they designed on it?
Money makes the world go around. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Without money as the motivation, open source projects will be limited to a few hobbyists twidding their thumbs on the keyboard.
@nick_papageorge_dayjob seriously? And you really think this is true?
Linux is widely used by professionals and many companies have built their products on it. Some examples:
Android, ChromeOS, Tizen,Snap Store are all professional software used globally and I dare say by yourself also.
Router firmware and embedded systems are found everywhere and are commonly based on linux. Devices like top set boxes and IoT switches are based on Linux.
IBM mainframes, Supercomputers, Smart devices and Network components often run linux because of their stability.
Klipper, a 3d printer management software, is totally based on Linux and it is opensource itself. Klipper is being looked at by quite a few 3d printing machine companies as their firmware of choice. Soon enough 3d printing will be mainstream for businesses and Klipper will become the goto firmware of all of them. Basically the whole 3d printing movement started out as opensource with RepRap, a bunch amateurs giving away their spare time for free, like Kevin O'Connor. He created Klipper in 2014 as a way to enhance the performance of his 3D printer by leveraging the computational power of a general-purpose computer, such as a Raspberry Pi, alongside the printer's microcontrollers
And last but not least, Ubuntu core is a minimal secure Linux OS used in Iot and edge devices for rubust management and deployment. Container-Optimised OS, or COS, is developed by Google for running Docker containers and this is based on ChromiumOS which uses Linux at its core. Google, you know that bunch of hobbyists twiddling their thumbs on their keyboards?
Yes money is the prime motivator, but it is also the prime suspect when you look at development stagnation, global inequality due to technology not being freely accessible.
And finally, when source code is open, you are safer! That is a fact! Closed software is almost always containing backdoors and bugs. Most bugs are first found by the open source community. And backdoors puts you at risk from greedy people and spying governments! All in all I do not think your arguments hold a lot of water.
Perhaps it would be more realistic to convince them to offer more favorable/perhaps even free licenses for research and small projects that don't directly compete with NX and Solid Edge? And to make the API documentation public in that step. Potentially with NDA access to the actual source code for selected individuals.
CAD kernels, particularly ones that have grown over decades are probably not the easiest software to wrap your head around. Even for the open source OCCT kernel (e.g. used by FreeCAD) the number of people with a deep enough understanding to be able to make substantial contributions is not high (4 people with more than 100 commits, 1 person with more than 1000 commits). These contributions are of course very valuable and can make a lot of difference.
That way Siemens wouldn't have to fear control loss, they would still have the saying over the kernel and could see how things develop.
@fst
Siemens did give Plasticity a lower Parasolid licensing fee than they charge for MCAD stuff like Onshape and Solidworks. Plasticity is aiming more to compete with Blender, Rhino and Alias for modeling. It will likely get some light history so it can at least live update a loft or Square surface if the curves change, but it’s not going to have a complex feature tree or 2D mechanical drawing package with GD&T.
Didn't a bunch of them start as closed? ATT developed Unix, right? Then opened it up later into FreeBSD I think? Then that morphed into Linux. Then IBM bought Red Hat. Apple built OSX on FreeBSD, then closed it up years later. etc.
I get your point that open stuff can lead to new products, new innovations, etc. But at the end of the day, it's the commercial users of these "free" products that advance them greatly, and they are all for-profit. It's not a bunch of coding hobbyists advancing them for fun. Without money as the motivation, no one except a handful of people would bother coding anything.
-Or- designing anything in CAD.
Not exactly. Unix was develloped by ATT and at some point distributed to universities so students could work with it. This started innovation because the students improved and made new things with it and for it, It was never made opensource as such. Linus Torvalds created Linux totally from scratch from the ground up. There is of course similarities because Torvalds was inspired by Unix and the fact it was distributed to universities. This might have been his largest inspiration to create something that was truly open and accesible for all.
Since its releases of subsequent versions, many companies took Linux as their core computing kernel. These companies are all for profit and operate in our economic climate, and some very well you could say. So to state that money turns the earth around is true of course, but it does not mean that if some source code is open, the economic dependencies break and people do not want to work with it. In fact it is the opposite, linux has developped a whole new business based on opensource computing.
Examples are:
Red Hat which developped RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now a standard in enterprise environments
IBM who made their own distro called LinuxONE
Intel focussed on chip compatibility and open source drivers. They also contributed to the kernel development
Canonical, this is the company behind Ubuntu, which is now one of the most popular desktop distro and has some server distros also
Funny enough even Microsoft contributed with their Hyper-V virtualization tech.
All in all the history of Linux shows that opensource promotes development, innovation and helps new businesses. Personally I do not accept that computer code is a product for sales. I see computer codes as tools that enable bright people to come up with good things that help everybody from business to government and individuals. Take free code and make a new product with it and sell that product. Make a service package that includes many innovations which are closed off and protected by patents but use free source code. Nobody in their right mind will argue that it will be "stolen" as such. It truly helps innovation like nothing else while it does not hamper businesses.
Think of another aspect of this, peripheral devices!Is it not annoying that you can still buy computer mice, like the 3dconnexion space and cad mouse, that simply do not work in certain environments? If the source code was all open this would never happen at all.
see the thread here on onshape forum:
Yes I am a great fan of opensource, not because one can have free stuff but because I am convinced that it will be part of a new revolution in computer tech. All this protectionist business is old hat (for code). Economies do not do better because of it, it hampers them.
Should software devs get paid? Yes. A lot of open source devs are paid.
-Mozilla has employees.
-The people who maintain Linux are largely employees of other companies submitting patches and driver updates to their own hardware. Then there's the foundation employees. And Linux runs the majority of the servers in the world.
-VLC is open source. It's a nonprofit and they pay their employees. I don't know their revenue model but they've been around for as long as I can remember.
-Onlyoffice is a cloud software service and their software is open source. You can run your own server if you want, but they sell the service so people don't have to.
Will people who want to use the kernel for free give away their time on it? Oftentimes yes. Absolutely. Academic work such as the project I linked to in the original post are indeed giving it away for free. I can't imagine that academia and other researchers wouldn't benefit greatly from being able to generate solids and 3D surfaces that can work well with booleans/logic vs just dealing with awful point clouds. I'm sure there are other uses as well.