Law Suit Shocker! Autodesk vs ODA

Randall Newton has the details on Autodesk's law suit against the Open Design Alliance.

In the past, the ODA's head has threatened to sue Autodesk, but didn't have the $2-3 million it needed. Now the boot's on the other fella's foot.

Will Dassault Systemes, Bentley Systems, UGS, PTC, and other industry heavyweights counter-attack Autodesk?

Will Autodesk's army of blogs provide blow-by-blow coverage?

Comments

[R. Paul Waddington]

"Will Autodesk's army of blogs provide blow-by-blow coverage?" Only if they are winning!

[Scott]

I have many options when using Microsoft Word Documents, or Adobe PDF files for reading and writing these files. I dont have to buy Adobe or Microsoft Word to work with the files produced by those programs.

There are years of precedent in the market of products produced by third parties reading and writing files produced by a particular vendors product.

Why then does Autodesk feel it has the right to control who uses this file type by controlling the applications that can read and write the file? They are telling you either buy Autodesk, or you can't work with your own drawings.

Shouldn't I have the choice of the application I want to use no matter the format of the file I am working on?

Give us your opinion, take our quick one question, anonymous survey at http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl?iid=4089

[John Burrill]

Well, I responded yes, but the poll didn't give me room for caveats, so I'm putting them here:
First, let's step on this little bit of insanity:
"Shouldn't I have the choice of the application I want to use no matter the format of the file I am working on?"
Sure buddy, go write a DWG from Word and see what you get and watch your mouth when you talk about rights. Next thing you know, we'll have legislation defining file formats instead of business people and programmers.
But my weigh-in is 'yes, if I can get at the information in a DWG and accept the risk of translating it, I've excercized my right as owner of that data.' I can enlist any help in that endeavor, even that of people Autodesk competes with. I can show people how I did it, and I can do it for money and sleep soundly at night.
What I can't do is force Autodesk to help me.