We are shutting down Ondsel

Unfortunate but extremely predictable. The commercial market for CAD cares about CAD that actually works, not free software ideals. FreeCAD is simply not in the same league as commercial CAD like Solidworks, NX, Creo, etc. IMO it's not even in the same league as SolveSpace, at least last time I used it (which was admittedly some years ago).

The parent comment rephrased: 'oh it was a useless effort like any other effort to push open source in CAD'. (Not true btw, Blender is an institution in non-parametric design, the niche for open-source is just for parametric CAD).

How is open source supposed to break through to this 'market' as you call it? Should we just give up instead?

I think the main sentiment was more about FreeCAD being extremely bad to use, and not against Ondsel's efforts to make it better.

I just tried installing the new RC of FreeCAD, and it's still a horrible horrible unusable mess (despite all the improvements of Ondsel).

Anyone trying is probably better off starting from scratch on the GUI, and only extracting the algorithmic bits from FreeCad.