When I began my career as an assistant architect 12 years ago, I used AutoCAD R12, 3D Studio, CorelDraw 6.0, and Photoshop 4.0 for architectural drawing and 3-D modeling. Today, many architects still use their later versions, but those bulky packages provide many functions an architect will never use.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. Linux users may want to take a close look at some of the free and open source programs that perhaps can equal most of the features offered by AutoCAD. Here are some of the best free and open source CAD software for Linux that you may want to check out...

It happened today... Bricsys released the official version of bricscad V10. No long in beta stage is now commercial with version 10.6.3-2 (windows version is 10.4.18-1). So now Linux users have a CAD software capable of handling DWG file format. Now there is no excuse to stay with windows just because you need Autocad. Bricscad is a very capable software and in many case can do better.

« Quite recently, the GNU project has announced Guix, a new package manager for the GNU system. [...] The announcement has apparently attracted quite a lot of attention and it has been in the news quite a lot, such as on Linux Weekly News, Phoronix and Reddit [...] »

There is in fact a coming divide that will hit the Linux community like a freight train. The battle lines have already been drawn, and companies that support Linux, such as Canonical, will eventually find themselves fiercely pitted against companies like Linspire, who only a short time ago, entered into an agreement of cooperation.

"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."

With the news of Linspire's CNR coming soon to Ubuntu, and Automatix now offering a limited number of closed source, commercial applications, what possible consequences will this have on the Linux community and open source as a whole?

Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester, just Twittered something that is about to hit the traditional software world like a ton of bricks:

Just got off the phone with a client who's been mandated to use [open-source software] because licensing costs are killing them.

Call it the beginning of the end, if you like, but it's coming.

It seems like we're really on the subject of filesystems and related technology the past few days. We had an interview with the man behind BeServed, an item on WinFS' current status, and now we - possibly - have news on ZFS coming to Linux. Possibly, because it's all speculation from here on out.