January 2019, “Community Choice” Project of the Month – LibreCAD

For our January 2019 “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected LibreCAD,an open-source cross-platform 2D CAD program. LibreCAD was previously chosen “Staff Pick” Project of the Month in August 2016 where the LibreCAD team spoke about the project’s developments and direction. Recently we caught up with developer Armin Stebich to find out how the project has been doing since then.

SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were chosen Project of the Month in August 2016?
Armin Stebich (AS): Sadly, we had to go over the loss of some core contributors for various reasons. But, we also got a couple of new contributors who more or less regularly rush in with new features or bug fixes.

A big move was made behind the scenes. We moved all our self-hosted services to a new server, as the old one was outdated. Now we can serve our updated online services over secure HTTPS connections.

As a result of our Google CodeIn participation we also switched to a more simple and responsive website. We had some outstanding contributions from the young attendees, which we could combine in the new site.

SF: What are your current project goals?
AS: We are working on finalizing the next release 2.2. And in parallel, work on our ‘from scratch’ version 3 is still going on.

SF: What project goals or improvements have you achieved so far?
AS: The 2.2 release candidate has received lots of valuable contributions and is in a very stable state now. We moved over to Qt 5 and modernized the code base with C++11 features.

There is also progress in LibreCAD 3, but we are still not in a ready-to-use state here.

SF: What can we look forward to with LibreCAD?
AS: I expect the release of LibreCAD 2.2 in the first half of 2019.

And hopefully, we can continue our GSoC participation to find new contributors for LibreCAD 3 and make more progress there.

Also, recently a community member started a documentation initiative to bring more quality to our documentation. Writers are more than welcome to support us here. For all those interested, the coordination is done in our sub forum at http://forum.librecad.org/LibreCAD-doc-f5716545.html.

SF: Is there anything else we should know?
AS: We still need developers with good math and/or C++ skills.

[ Download LibreCAD ]