LibreCAD is a free Open Source CAD application for Windows, Apple and Linux. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. You, too, can also get involved!
LibreCAD started as a project to build CAM capabilities into the community version of QCad for use with a Mechmate CNC router.
Since QCad CE was built around the outdated Qt3 library, it had to be ported to Qt4 before additional enhancements. This gave rise to CADuntu.
The project was known as CADuntu only for a couple of months before the community decided that the name was inappropriate. After some discussion within the community and research on existing names, CADuntu was renamed to LibreCAD.
Porting the rendering engine to Qt4 proved to be a large task, so LibreCAD initially still depended on the Qt3 support library. The Qt4 porting was completed eventually during the development of 2.0.0 series, thanks to our master developer Rallaz, and LibreCAD has become Qt3 free except in the 1.0.0 series.
LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature 2D-CAD application with some really great advantages:
It's free – no worry about license costs or annual fees.
No language barriers – it's available in a large number of languages, with more being added continually.
GPLv2 public license – you can use it, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our experienced developer team.
JetBrains have generously supplied us with CLion licenses for the development of LibreCAD. This powerful IDE helps you develop in C and C++ on Linux, OS X and Windows, enhancing your productivity with a smart editor, code quality assurance, automated refactorings, and deep integration with CMake build system.
BRL-CAD is a powerful open source cross-platform solid modeling system that includes interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, geometry libraries for application developers, and more than 30 years of active development.
The LibreCAD team is a small group of dedicated people. Lots of things have been worked out, but plenty of bugs and features are still waiting to be solved. How can you help? We need people that are coders, testers, translators. We currently don't have everything in place, so it will always help if you have existing resources we can use, know what other projects do in specific areas, or, most important, do what you do best and have fun doing it!
Come join our community, and contribute in any way you like:
http://qt-project.org/downloads.
Instructions for compiling LibreCAD can be found here.