Open Source Software in Mechanical Computer-Aided Design/Drafting - Part 1 (precursor)

This post is sort of a pre-cursor to what I hope to delve into with this blog i.e. try to identify the state of the art/research of Open Source Software (OSS) in Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD), Product Data Management (PDM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

While open source software has had its fair share of success in numerous technology domains e.g. operating system kernels (Linux), operating systems ( Debian, Red Hat), web browsing ( Mozilla Firefox), databases (MySQL), middleware ( JBoss) and others, there is not much we hear about open source in the domain of manufacturing e.g . computer-aided design or product data management. I believe this is primarily due to the following reasons:

1. Firstly the end users of CAD software are not usually programmers. This means that unlike the other popular open source projects the end users of CAD will not contribute code back to the open source software they are using.
2. Secondly programmers rarely delve into the domain of CAD (of course this is when compared to the number of programmers in the other OSS projects)
3. Thirdly (and I believe the most important) most CAD companies such as PTC, Dassault , UGS and Autodesk rarely foster an open attitude or community for their products. These companies build strictly proprietary software providing little in terms of interoperability between each other. Sound familiar? Companies such as Microsoft have been accused of this kind of behavior for decades. But CAD companies, while not as big as Microsoft, will not have such accusations hurled at them and one reason is that there is no clear Monopolist.

So where does this leave open source projects? Well that is what I intend to find out - what kind of support can open source projects give to the users when dealing with MCAD?

Well it turns out from scouring the web that the idea of using open source software for CAD design is quite common but most leads do not end well. While open source software has some great advantages over its proprietary counterparts in other domains, when it comes to CAD, proprietary software has little competition from open source counterparts.

With the next few posts I will try and identify some successful open source CAD projects in addition to some of the not so successful. You may also find some free MCAD software mentioned here even though they are not truly open source. I do not intend this to be a comprehensive list as I but one individual. If I have missed an important open source CAD project do let me know and I will review and include it.

I invite any comments you may have as it would help improve the quality of future posts.

In sync with UNISON

Unison is an amazing backup tool that is fortunately available on both Windows and Linux. Since it is open source it is available readily on various Linux distros (e.g. on Unison on Debian) so that you can just perform an "apt-get install unison" for Debian and have it running and accessible from computers in your network for example. But getting it work seamlessly on Windows is a little more work.

Fortunately there is an alternative (not to Unison) but to actually deploying it on Windows. This alternative comes from Cygwin which sets up a Linux-like environment for Windows (that last part was from the Cygwin website). Cygwin includes unison as part of its package and by installing Unison with Cygwin you can setup your Windows box as an SSH server with Unison so that you can backup files to this Windows box from anywhere with an internet connection.

To make sure you install Unison while installing Cygwin make sure that on the "Select Packages" window click on "View" button (on top right corner) once till the text next to the button says "Full". Scroll down till you see unison2.9.1 in the "Package" column. Then click in the second column from the left once so that the latest version shows up instead of "Skip" (at the time of writing this blog the version was 2.9.1-3). If you want to access Unison from over a network then make sure you install "openssh". The steps to install "openssh" with Cygwin is available here. And for good security make sure you setup SSH Keys using either this method or this method. I will try and add more details to the steps in future blogs. If you need help then post a comment and I will respond.

Synchronizing bookmarks with Firefox: Hacking the extension

There is an awesome extension at http://addons.mozilla.org called the Bookmarks Synchronizer that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks stored in your Firefox local profile with either an FTP/WebDAV server. While this is common knowledge so is the fact that this extension has not been updated for the 1.5 version of Firefox.

I am sure an update will be posted soon as the extension author's webpage at http://torisugari.spymac.com/ (I am hoping this site is the author's - the name is the same but no other information is provided) features the updated extension for alpha/beta version of Firefox. I do not suggest installing extensions from unknown sources as there is no way to guarantee its security, so am posting this alternate solution to get the old version available at
Bookmarks Synchronizer to work with your Firefox 1.5 profile. To do so follow these steps:

1. Download the extension from Bookmarks Synchronizer using the right click -> Save As... option.
2. Rename the .xpi file to .zip (I am assuming that you are using windows. This may work with other OS but I have not tried it). Open the zip file in your favorite zip extractor and extract the contents and please preserve the folder structure.
3. Open the folder where you have saved the extracted contents and go into the "chrome" folder.
   
4. You will find a single file named "bookmarksftp.jar". Rename this file to "bookmarksftp.zip" and unzip it to another convenient location.
5. Go into the "content" folder.
   
6. Open the file "bmsyncOptions.js" in a text editor. Search for all the instances of the term "NC_NS" in this file and replace it with "gNC_NS". Save and close file in original location.
7. In the same folder locate "selectFolder.xul" and open it in your text editor. Search for all the instances of the term "NC_NS" in this file and replace it with "gNC_NS". Save and close file in original location. (There should be only one instance in each file).
8. Go to the parent folder and find "install.rdf". Open this file with a text editor and find the line with the text "". Change the number at this node to 1.5 (or even 1.5+). Save and close file in original location.
   
9. Rename the zip file to jar and zip the contents back into the zip file and rename that zip file to xpi. At the end of this step you should have the original xpi with two minor modifications to the two files mentioned in step 6 and 7.
10. Drag this .xpi file to your Firefox 1.5 window and install and restart Firefox.
11. Test

Alternative method for those who are upgrading browsers and have a version of Bookmarks Synchronizer already installed:

1. Open your profile folder. To find out where your profile folder is go to this link Mozilla Knowledgebase.
2. Open the "extensions" folder. Navigate to the folder (it will have an odd name like {e133f188-27e7-401d-be2e-804643793acb}) under "extensions" which has a file named "bookmarksftp.jar" under the "chrome" folder.
3. Follow steps 5 - 8 above.
4. Having saved the new files back into the same location, zip the files up and rename the zip file preserving the name (but for extension from jar to zip and back to jar) to "bookmarksftp.jar",
5. Drag the odd named folder (with the new bookmarksftp.jar) to any new profile to which you want the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. If you made edits to your current profile then you should restart Firefox for the changes to show up. I would suggest doing this in an alternate location and then dragging the odd named folder, example stated above in point 2, to the extensions folder under your profile folder.
   

I should thank "Phil Kilinskas" as it was his comment on this extension that prompted me to find a solution to my problem. And fortunately it works well. For those waiting for this update before moving to Firefox 1.5 should be able to do so without waiting for the author as 1.5 really rocks.