This is the English reading version of the Dutch news item CadCraft (The one app that will rule them all), maar dat duurt nog wel even.
Eight open-source CAD and BIM apps under one roof, put online within two weeks and released under Apache-2.0: CadCraft for drafting, BimCraft for BIM, ModelCraft, MarkupCraft, TakeoffCraft, CivilCraft, DetailCraft and PartCraft for parametric parts. The idea sounds good: one family of tools, in the browser and on the desktop, with your files on your own disk.
The execution leaves much to be desired. In our test the command line of the drafting app works, but the interface is not finished and it does not work well.
PartCraft, the app for parametric parts, runs on a mesh kernel: mesh modelling instead of NURBS modelling. Fillets on round edges and reading STEP files therefore do not work. OpenCascade, which can do both, is out again because its licence imposes obligations.
The licence they did choose, Apache-2.0, is one that lets you do anything with the code, including building your own commercial product on it. That is exactly what is waiting: next to the free apps the site lists SuperCad Studio as “A Licensed Commercial Product”, with the line “The one app that will rule them all” above it, and the pricing page says the licences go on sale with the first desktop build. Alongside it there is a Team Cloud Plan at 35 dollars per user per month.
My verdict: the idea is interesting, one app that can do everything, but FreeCAD is that too, a little. Fortunately they did decide here to make a separate app for each kind of CAD work; unfortunately, by doing so much, everything looks just not finished. The interface is odd and awkward in every app, and with a mesh kernel I cannot really take it seriously as a real CAD programme.