Announcing Ondsel - An open-core company building around FreeCAD

[sliptonic]

A lot of people in the community already know this is happening but the official launch announcement went out today so I thought I'd share it here and answer any questions.

What is it?
Ondsel is a for-profit public-benefit company established in the 'open-core' model. Good examples of open-core companies include Gitlab and Wordpress.

Why does it matter?
As FreeCAD has grown, it's gotten harder to resolve the big hairy problems with just volunteer developers and contributors. Ondsel's central mission is to improve FreeCAD, and advance its adoption by individual and commercial users. We'll be able to hire developers to work on FreeCAD. This isn't contract work. It's full-time employment.

Who's behind Ondsel?
Open Core Ventures is the venture firm backing the company through its startup phase.
I (sliptonic) am the founder / first-hire / janitor / etc / etc.
We'll be adding team members as soon as we can find them an bring them on board.

Where is Ondsel located?
Fully remote. We should be able to hire developers from almost anywhere in the world.

What you can do to help
Follow on Twitter
Follow on linkedin
(Yeah, I know. Everybody says that. But it really matters. Anything that increases the visibility of the company makes it easier to find and attract developers so please mash that like / retweet button)
Send developers to the careers page

Ask questions. Seriously. We've got a long way to go to figure out how to be both a sustainable company and a good member of the FreeCAD community. We'll need help to do that right.

Logo_LightBG-small.png (15.25 KiB) Viewed 1823 times

[chennes]

Congratulations, @sliptonic -- that's very cool, I'll be interested to see how the work your company's engineers do gets integrated into the development process here. Full time employees can generate a LOT of code, very quickly. Exciting, but also terrifying .

[chrisb]

Congratulations!

[user1234]

Congrats!

Ask questions. Seriously.

OK, to be honest, maybe there is something lost in translation, but i do not really get the concept.

Here you wrote:

As FreeCAD has grown, it's gotten harder to resolve the big hairy problems with just volunteer developers and contributors. Ondsel's central mission is to improve FreeCAD, and advance its adoption by individual and commercial users. We'll be able to hire developers to work on FreeCAD. This isn't contract work. It's full-time employment.

And here https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023- ... ad-launch/ and other places you said

“Our initial customer set is the small firms with an end-user customizable product. They want to use their 3D designs on their website so their customers can interact, customize, and explore the product”

, or similar, what i meant, it is this is about models and CAM, not FreeCAD development per se.

So is it about FreeCAD devolpment, or a kind of (better for) 3D and Modeling repo/data(base)tool based on FreeCAD? No problem with both, but i just do not get it.

Greetings and good luck!
user1234



edit: spacing

[obelisk79]

I'm going to add onto user1234's questions.

Is the company product a means of leveraging FreeCAD as a backend engine to drive web-based model (aka product) customization through manipulation of exposed parameters via a web interface?

In what ways, direct or indirect will this shape FreeCAD development? Will there be specific development focus on certain aspects of FreeCAD, or is the vision more general, and the services are a means to fund development?

[adrianinsaval]

very cool project, what are the requirements for hiring?
It might be interesting some day to also work on improving occt where required, do you foresee doing something like this in the future?

btw, the github link in the webpage is broken https://github.com/ondsel

[sliptonic]

The last few months have been a real eye-opener for me.
I've been around the FreeCAD world for quite a while and I started seeing things change about a year and a half ago. Besides the huge influx of refugees from the Fusion debacle, I kept seeing more interest in the project from commercial users and more demand for a project roadmap.

As the project has gotten bigger, it's gotten harder and harder to tackle big changes. Just in the Path workbench I've been overwhelmed. I wanted to spend more time working on it but I also have to pay bills. So I (and others) started looking at ways to make a living while working on FOSS. We've tried Patreon, YouTube, writing books, consulting, etc. The FPA can take in money and hire contractors but, so far, nothing has been sustainable. If you want to have a paycheck, benefits, and work on open-source, it's just really difficult.

When OCV approached, they had a different mindset. It's obvious that there is commercial interest in an open-source CAD solution. It's also clear that FreeCAD isn't ready. So their approach is to fund a company to start working on FreeCAD full-time. Hire developers. Improve the UI. Help with the big challenges.

Of course, we'll have to have a product. The business will have to be sustainable eventually. We're just not rushing to say what that is because, to be honest, we don't know yet. It will probably have a lot to do with collaboration and cloud execution and I'm counting on smart engineers to help figure that out.

There were two things that got me interested in working on this; The first is the strong commitment they have to open-source, including forming the company as a PBC. The second is that they aren't telling us what the answer is. They're letting us figure it out.

[sliptonic]

very cool project, what are the requirements for hiring?

The first job descriptions are up. More will be coming.

It might be interesting some day to also work on improving occt where required, do you foresee doing something like this in the future?

If working on FreeCAD and building a product means working on occt, why not?

btw, the github link in the webpage is broken https://github.com/ondsel

Thanks for the catch. I'll fix that. I've set up github enterprise (they have a special deal for startups).
The link is https://github.com/enterprises/ondsel Not much there yet.

[kkremitzki]

That link doesn't seem to work either (perhaps it looks different for you when you're logged in) but I found this working link via search: https://github.com/Ondsel-Development

[sliptonic]

That link doesn't seem to work either (perhaps it looks different for you when you're logged in) but I found this working link via search: https://github.com/Ondsel-Development

You're right. The other is the enterprise view which I guess isn't public. Ondsel-Development is a public organization within the enterprise. This is my first exposure to github enterprise. There's a LOT of stuff here. Website link has been fixed now. Thanks.