The charter had accessibility only in the assistive sense — keyboard, contrast,
colour, targets — and said nothing about who can get through the door in the
first place. That was the larger omission. The premise of an OSS CAD tool is
that a kid on a school laptop, with no licence, no account, no fast machine and
nobody to teach them, can open it and make a real thing; a tool that only the
equipped can run reaches people who were already going to design something.
So the fourteen-year-old is now the FIRST of three audiences, ahead of the maker
and the mechanical designer, with an explicit rule that when audiences conflict
the earlier one wins unless someone writes down why not.
L11 states the floor: runs completely on a low-end laptop with integrated
graphics at 1366x768, offline, no account, and no capability withheld behind a
tier, a plugin or a cloud service. Section 6 splits into 6.1 reach and 6.2 the
assistive floor: the reference machine, the small screen as the layout target
rather than the stretch case, files that belong to the user, learnable with no
documentation, plain language at the entry tier, and exploration that is never
punished — undo reaches everything, nothing asks the user to be sure.
Consequences elsewhere: the screen budget is set by the smallest screen we
serve, not the reviewer's monitor; the PR gate gains a reach question; B6 joins
the benchmark (the inner loop on the reference machine, offline, fresh install)
and every task is measured there rather than on a workstation. The side-panel
debt now fails L11 as well as L1 — on that screen the cards leave the model a
strip.
One role addition: the absent audience needs a seat. The kid cannot file an
issue, so someone owns B5/B6 and the group watches real first-timers quarterly.
Approachability is the one thing here that cannot be argued from principle.
snaporca-2is.
The doctrine is shared but the document is not: each fork's copy now speaks
about its own product only, so it reads as that project's own charter rather
than as a note about a sibling repository. This is a deliberate divergence —
the two copies must NOT be reconciled by a parity sweep. The CAD sources stay
byte-identical; only this doc branches.
snaporca-2is.
The call with SoftFever settled that Orca-CAD is one of the branches to be
implemented and that a design+dev group forms around it. A group without a
written doctrine reviews by taste, and a CAD reviewed by taste becomes
FreeCAD one locally-reasonable side panel at a time.
So the doctrine is written first, as something a reviewer can FAIL a pull
request against: ten laws each with its own test, the interaction grammar
they compose into, the accessibility floor as a merge requirement, and a
ten-question gate answered in every UI pull request.
The position is Shapr3D's interaction economy, not its feature list —
direct, gestural, almost no chrome, depth revealed by what you touch. Depth
for mechanical designers arrives as progressive disclosure of tools that
never move, in three tiers, non-modal, with assemblies and exploded views
obeying the same point-then-act grammar as a beginner's extrude.
The one thing neither Shapr3D nor FreeCAD has is that we live inside a
slicer: plate, nozzle, material and build volume are known at design time,
so print-domain failures are warnings on the geometry, not a report.
Section 10 is an honest inventory: what already complies, and the six
things that violate the laws today, none of them defended. The appendix
keeps the anti-patterns we have already paid for, because each one is
cheap to reintroduce.
snaporca-2is.
Tommaso Bianchi