FREE!ship continues as DELFTship

[Martijn_vE]

I'm very proud to announce the fact that FREE!ship as of release 3.1 continues its life under the name DELFTship. DELFTship now comes in two versions:
The free hullform modeler and a professional version. The professional version has a few more features than the free version (such as an automatic fairing routine for example) but it can also be extended with some professional extensions for crosscurves, critical points, tank modeling and intact stability (load cases).

You can read more, download the latest free version (3.1) or try the professional demo at www.delftship.net

[Raggi_Thor]

It's still very good value for money, free or 150 Euro for the Pro version with import/export. And the name gives good vibrations :-)

[Mikey]

Fair Martijn, there's a whole lot of work involved.

What about IGES import / export?

Mikey

[Mikey]

OK, I have downloaded and tested, IGES is in the pro version, fair again.

Here's how it looks

[tandu]

Hello Martijn,
Well, I hope this step improve your product.
… maybe you have forgot something like “bulkhead wizard”

[marshmat]

Well, I still have some experimenting with the new version to do before I can draw too many conclusions. It looks nice and seems to function efficiently, for sure.
It'll be interesting to see how the project plays out now that new versions are not freeware anymore. Server space is expensive, and given how much time Martijn must be putting into this, he certainly deserves something for that! So I'm not at all opposed to a paid "Pro" version with more features.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell the "Free" version is actually less powerful than Freeship 2.6- IGES support is gone, as are some calculations such as basic crosscurves. I would have thought that the new free version would be at least comparable to the old, with the Pro version containing all the new, specialized code.
I'm curious how the pricing structure will work out. FreeShip was by a very long shot the best free/low-cost marine CAD software out there and seemed to be developing a very big user base (especially on this forum); it pretty much took the community by storm with the 2.x versions and is loved by many an amateur. DelftShip Pro starts at 150 euro (~$180 CDN) and the full suite is, if I read the table correctly, 1950 euro (over $3,000 CDN). In this range there is direct competition from big names like MaxSurf, Rhino (with rhinomarine), etc. which are widely used in industry and are very powerful general CAD programs as well. I'm not sure whether DelftShip Pro will be able to make many inroads here. Granted, the sale of only one or two full suites a month would go a long way, but it'll be hard convincing professional designers to invest that kind of money in a program when there are other, more widespread options that may be considered safer buys.
I may end up staying with 2.6 as, without IGES support and with limited stability-calculation power, DelftShip Free is much less useful for me.
Good luck with the project, Martjin; all the best and I hope it works out for you.

[PI Design]

I share your thoughts Marshy. Martijn does deserve recompense for the great job he has done, but as a commercial enterprise DelftSHIP has some stiff competition (although I think the range of features makes it unique at that price). One question though - if Freeship was an open source project, in theory at least, dozens of people may have contributed to the development of the code. How can this open source work be commercialised by a third party?

Sadly, anyone who was going to develop stuff for the open source programme will now surely sell it as an add on instead, much like Delft Uni seem to have. It's a bit like selling your soul...

I wish you the very best luck Martijn, but I'm glad I got 2.6 before it went commercial!

[pavel915]

i cant save the design in the free version of delftship!

[westlawn5554X]

I am happy freeship evolve into something better but too bad with a hefty price range.

The student would be stuck with 2.6..... I am just happy with it.

Non the less great job..................

[PI Design]

Hello,

I'm a little suprised no-one has picked up on my comment about commercialising an open source, GNU, code. Is this allowed? Is it ethical?

[CGN]

I think he wrote the code by himself, so what he does with it, is his own call and i support it

[marshmat]

I'm a little suprised no-one has picked up on my comment about commercialising an open source, GNU, code. Is this allowed? Is it ethical?

I think he wrote the code by himself, so what he does with it, is his own call

The GNU GPL does not prohibit closed-source developments from being based on open-source code. Indeed, a key component of the preprocessor for the $20,000 Fluent CFD suite is under the GNU LGPL licence. This is perfectly acceptable and common practice, as is charging money for open-source code. Companies that buy servers recognize that the developers who put millions of dollars and thousands of hours into server Linux work deserve to be paid for it, and that if they weren't paid the code would not exist. Here the GPL is a tool to allow effective collaboration and more efficient development of code. Remember, "free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-money".
Martijn may be the original author of the code, but once something is released under a particular licence, it stays under that licence- if that happens to be the GNU GPL as was the case with Freeship, then that code will always be open-source. A code cannot be retroactively placed under a different licence than it originally came with. You could still modify or add to the Freeship 2.6 code just as before.
Delftship may have the Freeship kernel at its core, but the program as a whole contains proprietary code now. Its authors decided not to make it open-source. That is their legal right and it must be respected. But it does not change the legal status of earlier versions that were under the GPL originally, and still are.

[westlawn5554X]

so someone can still come along and modify freeship 2.6 and share it as 2.7 on the net yes? no legal tangy?

[fcfc]

As far as I know, freeship is still available as GPL here : http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeship

Anyone can continue to evolve Freeship, provided he respects the GPL licence. : he makes his mofications freely avaliable as source code.

You cannot build closed source development based from open source.
You either need:
-> an agreement of all the original writers of the open source code.
-> make publicily available your source. (thus no longer closed)
-> Rewrite your own code, inspired from available open source code.

Delfship, proprietary software, property of martijn, can reuse all the GPL code written by martijn. GPL means other can use your code freely (more or less, modifications should be made public source) , but does not remove ownership of the code.

The real big problem is that no (or very few) programmers, contributed to Freeship code. Except Martijn.

[BillyDoc]

Martijn has done a superb job with this code so far, and we should all be very grateful for the work he has done, as I am. He not only started a new and wonderful approach to this particular problem, he has also demonstrated a way that any very good programmer with a good idea can start a project and get it shaped up to a level where commercial interest "takes it over," and the profits from that interest can then be gathered in. Nothing wrong with that! In fact, it's something I would love to see happen in some other fields, for example the horribly expensive software for more conventional CAD/CAM like Solidworks/Mastercam. I priced some very fancy 4 axis CNC milling machines a couple of years ago, and found that I would be required to pay more for the software to run them than the milling machines themselves cost! I found this to be very irritating. A clever person like Martijn, on the other hand, could develop some software to address this issue under the GPL and then solicit support for further development from the various CNC manufacturers once a working base was established, much as Martijin has done. It would definitely be in the equipment manufacturer's best interest to provide this support, just as many manufacturers such as IBM now support Linux development. I didn't buy the CNC machines I was considering exactly because of the software costs, so those sales were simply lost. Had their been a viable open-source solution, I would have bought them . . . simple as that.

And if you think that open source software is inferior, you haven't tried Linux lately, or Firefox, or Open Office . . . the list goes on and on. I've been bitten by the "bugs for bucks" thing too often to want anything much to do with the "big boys" in the various fields who make very sure that those bugs keep you "upgrading" and paying yearly extortion in the form of "maintenance fees" . . . in the vain hope of finally getting some software that works . . . which, of course, never happens. Open source code has problems too, but intentional irritating bugs isn't one of them.

And as has been pointed out, nothing prevents anyone with the interest from continuing with FreeShip development. You can download the source code from Sourceforge any time you want to. A very good start would be to convert it to compile on gcc, so that anyone could get in there and play with it without investing in a proprietary compiler (Delphi).

BillyDoc