The Future of FreeCAD BIM After Yorik's Stepping Down

You may have heard that Yorik van Havre, the maintainer and creator of the FreeCAD BIM Workbench, has stepped down from maintaining FreeCAD. This is huge news as Yorik has been part of the FreeCAD development team since 2008. You may read the reasons behind his departure in his statement, the main reason being the new AI policies of the FreeCAD project. Even though Yorik is not burning bridges behind him and stated that he will still be active in the community, it is clear that this marks a milestone in FreeCAD BIM development. So what will FreeCAD BIM future look like after the departure of the founder?

First, let's take a look at the history. Yorik is an architect, so he mostly worked on features that enable using FreeCAD in the AEC industry. This included the creation of the Draft Workbench, which is mostly used as a drafting tool. He later started with the development of the Arch Workbench, which aimed to be a solution for creating 3D architectural models. During the release of FreeCAD 1.0 in 2024, the Arch Workbench was merged with the external BIM Workbench as a new BIM Workbench, which is now integrated as part of the FreeCAD core. Yorik also created the native IFC functionality that was introduced in FreeCAD 1.0.

During this time, Yorik also became one of the leaders of the FreeCAD project. When the FreeCAD Project Association was formed in 2021, he was voted in as a chairman and has held the title since then. As per Yorik's statement, he will propose his resignation from this position too.

So how will this affect FreeCAD BIM development? The truth is that nobody knows. Open source projects often depend on what happens with individual people and nobody can see into the future, but this is the same in the commercial software development. With that said, several developers have been contributing to the BIM Workbench with high quality code in recent time. I will mention a few of these developers who have been contributing quite regularly.

Over the past few years, Roy-043 has been doing a lot of work on Draft and BIM workbenches. He does a lot of thankless work, like fixing bugs that nobody else wants to touch, reviews code of other developers and he also does a lot of work on maintaining the FreeCAD Wiki. This means that Roy does not bring many new flashy features to the project, but does the important work for the software to run well. According to GitHub stats, Roy has been active in FreeCAD development since 2020.

Furgo16 has been contributing since 2024 and he brought several new features to FreeCAD BIM, such as the new scheduling tool and also the covering tool, both of which will be available in the upcoming 26.3 release. Furgo cleaned up lot a of existing tools and streamlined some parts of the the UI. He also finished some of the work that Yorik started, such as the baseless wall implementation and creates premium Wiki documentation. You can read some of his work in this GitHub comment wit Furgo's roadmap over the past year with goals he was able to achieve. Furgo is also one of the maintainers of the Snap Store version of FreeCAD.

Paullee0 is a long time contributor to the BIM workbench. He started contributing in 2018. Although he mostly works on an external SketchArch Workbench, some of his code lands in the core FreeCAD too, such as fixes to the parametric stair tool. Paullee0 is also active in helping users in the FreeCAD forum.

Tritao rose up as a BIM developer recently, with his plan on improving the BIM modeling workflow. Up to this point Tritao was mostly working on improving the graphics, including some work on the Coin3D library, which FreeCAD uses for rendering objects.

Even though Maxwxyz primary focus is not BIM development, he started contributing quite regularly to BIM and Draft workbenches in the past year, fixing many bugs and adding some useful features. His main occupation is bug triage and he contributes to other workbenches too.

Marcuspollio does not contribute to the BIM code directly, but he provides valuable development feedback and he is also active in community management. Marcus create BIM board, where GitHub BIM issues are tracked. He is also currently working on new FreeCAD web pages.

There are many other developers who contribute to BIM and Draft workbenches code, but I am mentioning only these five because of their regular contributions. In fact, Yorik has not been contributing much code directly since the release of FreeCAD 1.0, due to his other occupation. This does not mean he was absent, as he was active in providing advice, management and code review in this time frame. So even though Yorik's departure will be a great loss, FreeCAD BIM development has not rested solely on his shoulders for the past few years. It is also important to mention that the BIM workbench is leveraging all the hard work of many developers who contribute to the FreeCAD core code.

One of Yorik's FreeCAD BIM models. CC BY-SA 4.0 Yorik van Havre

This is why I think the future of FreeCAD BIM is in good hands and we can look positively into the future of this project. Developers and few other active people from the community have set up weekly BIM Meetups, starting in September 2026. These open meetings are registered in FreeCAD events calendar and everybody who is interested in discussing the BIM workbench is welcome to join them.

We can all wish Yorik good luck in his future endeavours and thank him for all the hard work he put in creating the FreeCAD BIM Workbench. It is great achievement, as FreeCAD BIM is one of only two available free open source BIM authoring tools on the market. The second one being Bonsai. Yorik has already started working actively on a native IFC project called LinesCAD.