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The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user's Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.

1. "End Users’ files, designs, models... (collectively, “Content”)."
2. "All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document."
3. "If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service."
4. "For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User... Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same."

The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a "Customer" and an "End User," so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC's license compliance folks don't interpret things that way, though.

Good. This is going to go down as potentially the least enjoyable era of college football, but it's probably the most important to actually get D1 CFB up to the depressingly low moral standards of the National Football League.

It's all a big cultural and economic mess, but I think eventually, we will end up with a de facto collective bargaining setup -- whether that's laws, competitive necessities, a trade organization, or a formal league -- that gets around the clear abuse of the schools' market position (propped up by the NFL's 3-year rule and roster limits). A collectively bargained solution would probably still involve legal fictions and quaint absurdities like enrolling the players as students, but honestly that's fine by me. These are obviously "non traditional" students even by the kindest measure, and they may actually do better academically with access to scholarships or tuition waivers that can be a negotiated benefit and potentially continue past their "competitive usefulness".

The non-revenue sports could be a sticking point, because schools are bastards and will probably want to cut them if the football money is halved or whatever. I don't know what to do about it exactly, but the marginal cost of an athletic scholarship itself is nowhere near the sticker price, yet for the vast majority of student athletes it will be at or above the market rate for their athletic services. If the new system simply retains the programs and scholarships, then investment in facilities and coaching is less concerning. I will admit to a certain ambivalence about heavy investment in intercollegiate athletics where the alumni and other stakeholders don't seem overly concerned about the results. Our system of running so many top-end developmental sporting tiers through our universities is kludgy and antiquated and, frankly, kind of stupid.

Dragging the hulking corpse of the old model along, for long enough to save the schools many millions of dollars and the uncertainty of operating in a new environment. Eventually they will have no choice but to admit that the players are providing a valuable service in a competitive marketplace with many very specific demands on their time, and that the schools' brands are not the only part of the system that has value.

The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they're doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn't have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.

I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is... umm, a lot.

The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler's.

FreeCAD is on its way, it's attracting a little more money and attention, and I'm using it more and more, but I often still feel like I'm fighting it.

Too much gaming and The Expanse and arguing about Star Wars online to say I'm only doing productive nerdy things, but even back to high school and college, long before I ever heard the term, sometimes the urge to "just make somethin'" would become overwhelming.

Fair. I did spend a LOT more time thinking about Terms of Use and arguing with OnShape's legal department when investigating CAD apps than a normal human would have. I checked out of actual practicing well over a decade ago, though.

If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.

Linux wise, there's just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.

I may have done a longer writeup than anybody needed the other day.

Hello cousin. I feel where you're coming from.

I'm not a "Senior Process Analyst" or even a lawyer.

I'm a dad and a maker and a nerd.

This is the answer. It's only remarkable if you can't quickly get tacos anywhere else. It's kind of its own thing, though and it sort of hits the spot sometimes.

If I actually want Tex-Mex fast food, living in Texas I'd usually take any of the following before Taco Bell:

• Taco Bueno
• Taco Casa
• Taco Cabana
• Rosa's Cantina
• Taco Delite

Diablo sauce is gross, though. It's really no hotter than Fire (and neither is very hot) but it tries to do something smoky and citrusy or some shit, and being Taco Bell, they can't pull it off. Better to just go with the tomato and vinegar and powdered jalapeno in whichever concentration level they can handle.

Yup. This is corollary to the other post talking about diameter. If you make a perfect circle with your perfect meter of perfect string, suddenly you can no longer perfectly express the diameter in SI units, but rather it's estimated at 31.8309886... cm. Nothing is wrong with the string in either scenario.