Free, libre, or what?

One of the biggest changes for the end user that came out of the acquisition of SketchUp by Trimble affects the licensing of SketchUp. Google saw SketchUp as a tool to enable everyone to produce content for Google Earth, and Google being Google, they could also afford to give it away for free to everyone.

Unfortunately, Trimble had other ideas, and one of the first changes was to discontinue the free SketchUp edition for professional users. You can still download and use a free version (since 2013, it is called SketchUp Make), but you are not allowed to use it for commercial projects. This is good because it still allows everyone access to a fantastic tool to realize their dream projects and to learn and test the software without the need to pay for a license. It also pushes SketchUp as a professional tool back among all the other commercial software that promises quality and efficiency for a price.

In the previous edition of this book, good arguments were made for the use of free software in our visualization workflow. These arguments still stand, and we still encourage you to use free and open source software wherever it makes sense. However, when you work for money, the time you spend on training and learning several tools also has to be considered as an investment. It can be more effective to choose a commercial software package that you or your colleagues already know, over a free tool that does a similar job. For the rest of the book, we try to present both options when possible but will demonstrate the techniques only for the tools that are available to everyone.