They just announced it a week or two ago, but they’re keeping the server up for “a reasonable period” to allow users to migrate. From my understanding, many of their tweaks have been integrated into 1.0 and the team all plans to continue working with FreeCAD and submitting improvements.

I was recently roughly in the same place. I have played around in the past with a few things, but there were reasons I didn’t really get into any of them: Fusion360 and their increasingly limited free options, OnShape and their online only thing… so on…

FreeCad has a new release candidate for what they’re calling version 1.0, meaning they consider it a mature and functional piece of software. I’ve been working with it, and yeah… it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely usable now. I figured if I was going to put all that effort into learning something, I might as well learn something that would always be free.

Yeah, honestly that was at least partially my thought process posting this. I see someone else posted the same video and got a bit more traction as well, which is great: the more eyes on this, the more likely someone chooses to develop it. If someone develops a fork or plugin for various open source slicers, it’s usefulness should quickly become obvious and someone with deeper pockets will wind up going after the BS patent. Even as little as a 10% improvement in layer adhesion, if it’s reliable and consistent, is a significant upgrade. The old saying about a chain only being as strong as the weakest link comes to mind and layer adhesion is the weakest link in 3d printing.

lol My new Carbon printed it’s way through two rolls of 7 year old PLA last week and it’s doing fine with the equally old ABS (all Hatchbox). I also have one old roll of PLA and a couple of PETG that are less useful, but they were no-name stuff that were troublesome new and are at least partially to blame for me giving up on printing back then.

Still, it’s nice to see 3d printing is finally not too finicky to tolerate. With this machine, if I get a failure, it’s a lot easier to narrow down the cause.