For me, it’s small business retail. Point-of-Sale systems, physical inventory management, the existing options are not built for smaller operations or are not good.
For me, it’s small business retail. Point-of-Sale systems, physical inventory management, the existing options are not built for smaller operations or are not good.
I think that the question of whether an industry would benefit is a hard one. It depends on your perspective and what benefits one is gonna aim for.
I think that if I had to choose one category, I’d do CAD.
So, this covers a wide range of different industries and roles. 3D and 2D mechanical engineering. Chip and circuit board design. Designing 3D objects for 3D printers.
There is open-source CAD software out there, of varying degrees of sophistication and for different purposes. But in general, I kind of expected to stumble into a huge wealth of world-beating software. I mean, it’s a field with a lot of technically-oriented people who don’t mostly compete on the software as their core competency. I could see a lot of people wanting to scratch itches, and the situation to be kinda like it is for mathematics software, with strong open-source entrants. But that isn’t the case. There’s very much usable stuff, depending upon what you want to do. But the big boys in the field are proprietary.
There’s FreeCAD. I use openscad to do code-oriented design of objects for 3d printers. I wouldn’t call Blender a CAD package, more a modeler, though it’s adjacent to the field and there is some CAD-related add-on stuff. There’s QCAD. I don’t know how practical BRL-CAD is today, but it’s out there.
Yeah, I started in the architecture industry and it’s wild how much every company pays Autodesk in licensing fees, every year, for extremely little improvement to Revit (their architecture software).
For a mid sized company (~500 people), I think we were paying them like a full staff software engineer’s salary in licensing fees every year… and there are dozens of them in every country, let alone major firms, independent shop, contractors etc.
Really felt like the industry would benefit from open source CAD software that was collectively developed, but it’s not quick or easy to build CAD software that works flawlessly at scale and no single firm has ever had enough up front capital to fund the development of something that could compete. Plus once you collaborate with other architecture and engineering and planning firma, you now need to exchange files and standards (or better yet work together real time), and now you need a solution that can work for everyone.
autodesk are the most user hostile software company in the world. adobe are a close second.