On 06/25/2014 06:00 PM, zxq9 wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 June 2014 17:15:08 Lamar Owen wrote:
>> Now that a more recent version is available in the community edition 
>> this gets my vote .... The Community edition source is GPLv3 
>> licensed, and is available as an archive of source or through github. 
> ... What you can be pretty
> sure of with the QCad Pro VS (quite old now) QCad Community versions is that
> QCad Community won't support anything relatively new because it hasn't been
> touched for quite a while. QCad Pro will rarely have support for the *latest*
> format (which is usually no problem, since few folks use the *latest* AutoCAD
> anyway) and also not for the oldest DXF formats (also not a problem, because
> they are ancient). DXF is the MS Office format of the 2D CAD world.
>
> Also... the original author was quite an obstructive (something bad) about a
> new project forking his old GPL QCad Community codebase; viewing what we were
> up to as a threat instead of as a potential avenue for free advertising (or
> new ideas! sheesh!).
>

For what it's worth, the QCAD Community edition is now at version parity 
with the Pro edition.  The extra 'Pro' functionality is apparently not 
included in the sources but is included in the binary installers.  I've 
not attempted to build from source or do much with it as yet, but I was 
pleased to see it was now at the same version as the Pro version 
(currently 3.6.0).  Nor do I have direct experience with communicating 
with the author at that level.

DXF can't be as bad as Word (see 
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html 
for a rant on why Word format is so bad).  Surely DXF doesn't contain 
pointers to subroutines embedded in the file.....

But I've tried to do interchange with QCAD DXF of a while back; one of 
the other strong but not open source CAD packages available for Linux, 
Draftsight, just could not do it.  I haven't tried with AutoCAD 2009, 
the only recent version to which I have access.