(2016-10-13, 18:29)Willy Tschager Wrote: the LDraw Steering Committee agreed to allow digital parts of third parties in the LDraw Parts Library, which have a counterpart in the real world and are accepted by the LEGO fan community.
LDraw is the largest public source of digital LEGO parts and used by a vast array of software. Many software are dependent on it, even stud.io.
AFAIK, LDraw hosts two libraries: the main (aka official parts) library and the parts tracker (aka unofficial parts) library. Certification is painfully slow. It is difficult to become a parts author. The parts author tools are underdeveloped in comparison with parts user tools.
As an amateur MOC creator, I like the idea that LDraw could host part libraries for LEGO-compatible parts (as opposed to having them in private collections). However, I abhor the idea that non-LEGO parts were permitted in the same library (download packages). What if I accidentally made a MOC containing a non-LEGO part? Unacceptable!
It is great that LDraw can host the third-party part libraries, but I would not merge them with the existing two libraries. I would also keep the third-party parts outside the certification process just to save time and effort of the too few parts reviewers.