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Stepping back from FreeCAD maintaining

by Yorik on 24.07.2026 in freecad

Hi all,

This is to announce my decision to take a step back from FreeCAD maintaining. I have been part of the core team for almost 20 years now, and the project is taking a direction that is not the one I wish to work with. And this is fine, the FreeCAD project now has a strong, active and united team of maintainers, who are really pushing things forward and putting a ton of mechanisms in place to address the complexity of a project of this size.

As you might have seen if you followed the recent dev meetings, my main disagreement with the rest of the team turns basically around the use of AI. I see these tools as highly damaging for a FOSS project like FreeCAD. The serious environmental problems, the copyright issues, the ethical issues and most of all, top big tech companies forcing their way into a project that was there to offer people a safe place against them, all of this are things I feel we should protect the project against.

We tried to change our contributing policy to limit the use of AI. And there is an ongoing effort to make that policy more efficient, but the majority of developers and maintainers think we cannot go towards a full "no AI" policy, which I see as the only valid path forward.

The team of maintainers has other opinions than me and, again, this is fine. Having the team united and working well and in sync is the important part. But I am tired of being the annoying one, and I am probably also preventing the team to go fully where they want to go.

I'll not abandon FreeCAD and the many people here who are my friends. I'll just take some distance with the maintenance process.

Regarding the FPA, I also feel the mission I had set for myself to protect FreeCAD against these things has failed, and I'm also not sure I still have the needed legitimacy, so I'll propose to resign from the chair, but this will be a decision taken by the FPA members. In any case, I'll stay there help keeping the FPA on foot.

So this is not a goodbye, rather a fix to a situation that was not cool anymore for me. I sincerely believe the project is strong, with or without me on the maintainers team, and that its maintainers are doing a very good job at carrying it, with or without AI.

See you all around!

Yorik

by Yorik on 24.07.2026 in freecad

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