Riva Richmond of the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that former Alibre-employee Roman Voznyuk was arrested August 6 attempting to enter the USA from his current residence in Canada.
The programmer had been laid off from Alibre in 2003, and then returned to Russia. As first reported by upFront.eZine newsletter #359, Mr. Voznyuk offered an MCAD as a free download from a Russian Web site under the name of RaceCAD -- allegedly Alibre Design translated into Russian. Despite a user interface indentical to that of Alibre, Mr. Voznyuk insisted he had programmed it himself. A lengthy interview with him appears in upFront.eZine #360
Heh: Alibre liked the idea so much that they themselves began giving away a version of Alibre from an at-first-mysterious Web site called "X-CAD.com". The difference, of course, is that Alibre is the copyright holder, so they can do with their source code as they wish.
Update
Alibre denies the idea come from this incident. Still, it makes sense to give away a version of your software to deter pirates of all shapes. Why pay $1 for software that you can get legally for $0.
Hey Ralph,
Racecad had no impact on our decision to launch Alibre Design Xpress (originally as part of the anonymous X-CAD promotion).
-Greg
Posted by: Greg Milliken | Aug 22, 2007 at 04:27 PM