Translations:History/2/en

How it all started
FreeCAD began in January 2001 when Jürgen Riegel started working on the Cas.CADE project. Cas.CADE was a commercial software development framework that included a geometric modeling kernel (or CAD kernel): it was released under an open source license in 2000 and renamed OpenCASCADE. This made the realization of an open source 3D CAD program possible, as having to program a CAD kernel from scratch would have required a huge amount of work.