I’m a software guy. I love FOSS. Much of the tooling that I use is FOSS, and oftentimes the software is as good if not better than the proprietary equivalent.
Until very recently, this was not the case in hardware world. In many cases it’s still not the case. You will meet all sorts of purists here that will tell you FreeCAD is good enough, for instance. Well, I tried using FreeCAD to build a hardware product. And eventually switched to proprietary software because FreeCAD could not satisfy my use case. I made a genuine effort to use the FOSS variant, but it was not usable for me.
I’m more inclined to listen in hardware when someone says the FOSS tools are not good enough after that experience.
FreeCAD moved from "barely usable for hobby projects" to "yeah maybe if I'm really inclined to try it on a very a simple professional project". At least that's what my engineering colleague told me recently.
Which is a massive improvement and the result of many hours of fixing "boring" bugs, improving UX and all the other chores nobody wants to do.
Until very recently, this was not the case in hardware world. In many cases it’s still not the case. You will meet all sorts of purists here that will tell you FreeCAD is good enough, for instance. Well, I tried using FreeCAD to build a hardware product. And eventually switched to proprietary software because FreeCAD could not satisfy my use case. I made a genuine effort to use the FOSS variant, but it was not usable for me.
I’m more inclined to listen in hardware when someone says the FOSS tools are not good enough after that experience.