I’m confused about who is looking to evolve their branding. With no leadership, who is making the decision that a change is needed, and who will decide what that change will be?
With 40-plus years doing this kind of work, I have an observation that I’ve found to be almost universally true. When an organization’s logo is amateurish (as theirs is), when its overall visual branding is no better, and when it’s been using that visual brand for years, it’s a solid indication that it won’t recognize something better when it’s proposed.
There are exceptions, such as when a new CEO takes over — someone more savvy and fully intent on remedying the problem. However, the decision to launch a contest to spruce up the logo without a significant change to the visual brand (as you mentioned) is a sure-fire signal that the organization is clueless about visual branding and that the results of the tweaking will be just as incompetent as what it was meant to replace.
I don’t have a problem with open-source software and the volunteer efforts that go into improvements. For example, most of the websites I’ve built run PHP and Apache on Linux servers. For that matter, I’ve built most of those websites around Joomla—all open-source.
For me, the problem isn’t open-source volunteerism; the problem is ensuring competency and professionalism in all aspects of the project, including the non-core, peripheral aspects, such as branding.
The existing logo looks like it was cobbled together by a committee of software engineers who fancied themselves as designers. I know nothing about the FreeCAD software — perhaps it’s fantastic. However, the organization’s existing logo and how you’ve described the plans to improve it suggest the organization’s competence doesn’t extend beyond the core product.
There are open-source organizations with good or great logos—Mozilla, for instance. Great open-source visual branding is certainly doable, but not unless the people calling the shots realize the problem and choose to solve it by enlisting the efforts of experts (volunteers or not) instead of holding a contest with entries from their user base, which in this case are CAD users.