The good thing about OSS is you don’t have to be a programmer to contribute.
If the documentation is lacking you can write up a one pager and submit it to their wiki for integration.
https://wiki.freecad.org/User_hubHow am I supposed to write the documentation for software that I have no method of learning how to use?
By watching YouTube tutorials or turning on the monkey part of our brains and poking around in the software until something happens.
Unethical pro tip: write obviously wrong documentation, post it somewhere, and then wait for people to flame you while explaining the correct methods.
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve done that a couple of times when I was completly ignored for straight up asking how to do something.
This is the fastest and bestest way. And this is the reason Wikipedia works lol
Murphy’s Law: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer
I’m sorry you’ve had a poor experience with FOSS software, I’m sure the project will give you a full refund if you ask them.
You know what? That’s okay, I’ll just switch operating systems to Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS and start using Autodesk Fusion360, paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a recurring basis to at least two American corporations that directly support the rise of fascism. I’ll be directly financially supporting everything from AI slop to the abduction of academics in broad daylight but just think of the fives of minutes I’ll save over the next decade drafting cabinets.
Either donate or write the documentation yourself, complaining about unpaid FOSS devs and maintainers doesn’t do anything
Once again, “I don’t understand this, I guess it’s up to me to explain how it works.”
I didn’t go to software engineering school. I went to flight school. Reading and understanding the source code of an application as large and complex as FreeCAD is outside my skillset.
I’m a flight instructor. I can and have taken people from never having flown a plane before to licensed pilot. You want me to teach flight school, you’ve got to give me the plane’s POH. It is not my job to write the Pilot’s Operating Handbook. It is my responsibility to teach students how to read it.
You get me good documentation for this software I’ll create and publish a course on parametric furniture design. But I’m not going to sift through source code trying to figure out how to write a macro any more than I’m going to pull the panels off a Cessna and trace wires to figure out what the switches do. That is the responsibility of the people who made the damn thing.
Then donate money to the project
I’m pretty sure I can demonstrate that doesn’t work; people have donated more money to the project than I’m capable of giving alone and that didn’t bring about usable documentation. The definition of insanity is watching other people fail and then doing exactly what they did.
Maybe a commercial offering would be a better choice for you.
The only other package even remotely compatible with Linux is OnShape and their licensing terms are a non-starter. Frankly so are AutoDesk’s.
It’s an open source project, you dig into it a bit and issue a pull request with the documentation.
Why the fuck should an end user of mechanical engineering software know how to use Git? Does Blender leave entire features completely undocumented expecting their audience of 3D animators to write their APIs for them given nothing but the app’s source code? Does GIMP? Does KDENLIVE? Does Arch Linux? Hell no, Arch has a massive and detailed wiki. Imagine if there just was no documentation for how to script in Bash and the Arch devs were like “Oh yeah think you could write that for us? You know, while you’re trying to get something fairly basic done?”
