[jonantice]

I don't know how many of you regularly need to use a good CAD program but those of you who do probably know that there are few OSS CAD programs available. I know Bentley's Microstation (the best imho) is available for linux but I want OSS.
I know there is qcad (which I use), jcad, sagcad and others but they really leave much to be desired and as far as I can tell, are dead projects and in qcad's case is developed by a private company which realeases free, watered-down versions.
I was just thinking the other day that I'd actually be willing to learn C++ in order to contribute to a serious CAD project. I've worked some with SVG (scalable vector graphics) and I think that would be the way to go as far as file format (because it's XML). Other than that, all I know is that I want to see a professional, serious attempt at an OSS CAD program that is to AutoCAD and Microstation what the GIMP is to Photoshop.
Does anyone know of any promising CAD projects out there?

[harner]

VariCAD: http://www.varicad.com/
FreeCAD: http://www.ar-cad.com/products/freecad/download

Google is your friend. I don't know if that's what you're looking for or not.

[jonantice]

Believe me, I've googled
VariCAD is not open source (free 30day trial).
freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation
what I want to see is something geared more towards civil engineering, GIS, surveing. Until then, on linux, I just use qcad which does the basics well.

[tech_man]

How about BRL-CAD?

[minthaka]

Try Qcad! It works fine.

[Vergil83]

If I recall correctly there are some FOSS GIS programs out there (although I haven't used them).

[bidi]

Check the CAE Linux distro! It's main focus is Mechanical Engineering, but it does include software for all guys that aren't as cool as us MEs...

[Vergil83]

Originally Posted by bidi

Check the CAE Linux distro! It's main focus is Mechanical Engineering, but it does include software for all guys that aren't as cool as us MEs...

*cough**cough*

[hilowe]

Have you tried this link?

http://www.nawaz.org/wiki/index.php?...%2C_Scientific

It's a link to the table of equivalents, scientific. There's a list of 13 different cad programs, only 3 of which are supposedly proprietary.

Includes Varkon, Thancad, FreeEngineer, PythonCAD, OpenCascade.

I haven't used any of these, so I can't say if they're any good, but at least it's a place to start.

[Cabhan]

I have heard the complaints about CAD before: I know nothing about CAD, but best of luck with that!

On the GIS side of things, while I know nothing about that either, at BarCamp Boston this weekend, one of the talks mentioned QGIS as being a pretty good GIS program. It's based on GRASS, and apparently not as good as ArcGIS, but it was recommended for the Linux users in the audience.

http://www.qgis.org/