
Autodesk criticised by architects - nsoonhui
http://extranetevolution.com/2020/07/autodesk-criticism-extends/
======
CaliforniaKarl
Here's the Google cache of the page, as I think the site is dealing with the
traffic spike right now:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2OQV-Q6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2OQV-Q6kE_gJ:extranetevolution.com/2020/07/autodesk-
criticism-extends/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

I tried grabbing the site using archive.is, but the site is using something
called Imunify360, which threw up a Captcha, which was promptly archived
instead of the site.

Although the Internet Archive has a cache entry
([https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetev...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetevolution.com/2020/07/autodesk-
criticism-extends/)), it's returning a 503 (I don't know if the 503 is what it
got from the site, or if it's the Internet Archive returning the 503).

~~~
neonate
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetev...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200802064000/http://extranetevolution.com/2020/07/autodesk-
criticism-extends/) works for me now.

------
poseva
As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with
the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a
slowly painful death.

It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a
small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs
release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs,
but nobody listened.

We stopped using ASD and moved to Graitec Advance Steel and Advance Concrete,
for a couple of years everything was great, quick support, remote sessions in
case you struggled with something, new features, bugs fixed... and then...
Autodesk bought it. I still remember the morning when I read the news... I was
horrified. I remember talking with some guys at Graitec and they were shocked
also.

After this... was Autodesk Structural Detailing story all over again. Just a
product rename... and that was it. No more bug fixing.. no more new features..
they killed Advance Concrete in favor of Revit (which is one of the dumbest
thing ever... because Revit was years behind Advance Concrete as a concrete
detailing sw).

For concrete detailing we switched to Allplan. I think Allplan and
Graphisoft's Arhicad have a bright future together.

~~~
tomxor
Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams
for architects to start caring about buying FOSS. When you buy software it's
an investment - you invest your time in integrating it into your workflow and
your employees learning to use it... your investment is tied to the future of
that software.

If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's
source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software
and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company.

But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects
combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a
large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now
is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in
the future.

~~~
Ericson2314
I think it's definitely possible. Look at Blender and GRASS GIS, some of the
most successful open source projects among non-programmers of all time.
Architecture tool is merely the midpoint between those too domains, right? :D

~~~
IshKebab
Architecture tools are way more niche. I think a better place to look is
mechanical CAD: how many decent open source mechanical CAD programs are there?
Approximately one: SolveSpace. And that is quite basic - even simple stuff
like bevels is not supported. Absolutely nobody whose livelihood depended on
it would use it.

It's just too niche and too complicated for there to be enough developers
willing to writing it for free.

~~~
rbanffy
How much money would be needed to turn SolveSpace into something usable?

~~~
neutronicus
Call Siemens and ask what they charge for Parasolid. Hint: you have to ask,
so...

Computational Geometry is hard. FOSS CG Kernels are not going to spring from
the ether. CGAL exists, but its target audience is CG researchers. OpenCASCADE
exists, but it's really a loss-leader for proprietary extensions and
consulting contracts.

~~~
rbanffy
Maybe they can spring from a consortium of interested architects.

------
imgabe
There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat
Autodesk from the building design industry.

Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still
so ridiculously far from where it could be.

I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software
tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or
"package manager for X" to almost anything outside software and you'd be
hailed as a revolutionary genius.

For Revit specifically, version control for construction drawings or a package
manager for Revit families would both be huge.

~~~
Hokusai
> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity

If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk
software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would
sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island
free of the pandemic by next morning.

The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in
1,000 to get 10 billion, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000).
50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk... any of them has deep
pockets to buy any one that has a chance to steal their business. It is a good
deal for the challengers, because is a all-cash no-risk opportunity better
than any expected value. It is a good deal for the big-ones as they protect
their business and some times they get a good deal (YouTube). The consumers,
the economy and society as a whole are the big losers in the deal.

~~~
jasode
_> If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing
Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I
would sell it so fast [...] The rational is simple. I will make up some
numbers: [...]_

The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have _egos_
and many would rather keep ownership of their company and _don 't want to work
for someone else_. (I made previous comment about this.[0])

Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry
Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their
boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".

In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes"
to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]

If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come
calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to
them but you don't have to sell.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098)

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-
twitter-...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-
didnt-sell-to-facebook/)

~~~
thinkloop
> Yahoo made offers to buy Google

I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them [1]

[1] [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-
down-1-...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-
down-1-132805083.html)

~~~
jasode
_> I think you have that backwards, Google kept asking Yahoo to buy them_

The early 1998 $1 million offer was prompted by Larry Page and Yahoo rejected
him. However, the 2002 offer of $3 billion was from Yahoo and Google rejected
them. In 2002, Google was already starting to see profits so they were under
no pressure to sell.

~~~
thinkloop
You're right:

"In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiations to
acquire Google, which lasted several months.

The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balking at Google's price tag of $5
billion."

------
gorgoiler
I don’t really understand SaaS for such mature products.

My work (woodworking) is about making pieces of furniture. Using software is
only a part of the process. It is not the actual goal.

I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t
want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t
want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original
price of the software.

~~~
taneq
> I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I
> don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I
> don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the
> original price of the software.

Of course you do. So do I!

However, the bunch of developers wants you to fund them noodling around
indefinitely, and sadly they're the ones that choose the business model.

If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...

~~~
david_draco
> If only FreeCAD had a UI as approachable as Fusion 360...

You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD
UI.

~~~
adventured
> You could pay a random professional software company to improve the FreeCAD
> UI.

Software develoment is of course quite difficult. Good software development is
that much harder. Sure, you could pay a company to try to improve the FreeCAD
UI - you could pay a company a lot of money to botch the effort, deliver a
mediocre outcome, take a zillion years to finish, go far over budget it while
still getting a mediocre outcome, and so on. If it's anything other than a
good outcome, most likely you just stole resources from the rest of your
business and now you're worse off. The odds are against you.

It's one of the many reasons people stick with their 75% or 85% good enough
present solution. They're busy running their own business. Trying to manage a
software development endeavor on the side is a huge tax (that much more so if
you're not in the software business).

~~~
taneq
> It's one of the many reasons people stick with their 75% or 85% good enough
> present solution.

100% this. That's one thing many people don't realise until they run a
business - there are so many things which MUST be done, all the time, just to
keep the lights on. When you do get a rare gap in those, you're better off
developing and improving your core product than indulging yourself by spending
resources on some unrelated nice-to-have.

------
jacquesm
Interesting that the criticism is levelled at Autodesk 'the company' rather
than that it admits what people don't want to say: Autocad is pretty good, and
it will take a large and well funded entity to take it on. Using anti-trust
tools may be the right tool here but the industry as a whole was quick to
adapt to Autocad long before it became a dominant player.

Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it. It
was essentially game over by the mid 1990's and since then they have only
further consolidated their position. BIM hookups and the very large amount of
software that somehow interacts with Autocad or has been written in AutoLisp
are the kind of lock-in that newly minted start-ups can only dream of.

Improving on Autocad is going to be very hard, it will take a long time and
even then you will probably lose the game. Acquisition is probably your best
bet, unseating a dominant player that doesn't make any major mistakes is super
hard.

I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than forcing the opening up of
all file formats and interoperability information. And lots of that is already
open.

~~~
thdrdt
I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not
only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well.
What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features
and improvements.

The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are
starting to look somewhere else.

~~~
jacquesm
CAD software is _hard_. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is
super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look
impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement.

And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the
incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be
hard to learn.

As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to
stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's
none of them interoperable with the rest.

~~~
thdrdt
Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad.

And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this.
Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very
fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.

~~~
jacquesm
Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the
first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.

~~~
lokedhs
I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me.

Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to
figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in
the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with
Blender.

~~~
DonHopkins
Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use.
It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still
insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There
are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent
ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.

------
DonHopkins
I certainly hope all the people who signed that letter are safe and sound.
Autodesk can come down pretty hard on their critics:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-
sgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk)

[https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-
conference-...](https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-conference-
ton-talks-about-autodesk-ceiling-crashes/)

>Blender Conference: Ton talks about Autodesk, ceiling crashes

>While Ton was talking about Autodesk during the Blender Conference, part of
the ceiling of the Balie came crashing down, hitting him on the head. So
remember folks: Autodesk is watching! ;-)

>Here's a picture of Ton after the event:

[https://media.blendernation.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/T...](https://media.blendernation.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Ton-after-ceiling-crash.jpeg)

------
cosmotic
You could swap Adobe in for Autodesk and almost the entire letter holds true.
High cost, few improvements, few alternatives. There's a little more
competition these days with Adobe at least.

~~~
spiderfarmer
I agree, Adobe lost me to their competition. Affinity Designer, Publisher and
Photo replaced the Adobe Suite for me and while I miss some functionality, I
don't miss the monthly payments. Maybe if I was a fulltime designer I would
not have a problem with Adobe.

~~~
omnimus
I dont know full time designer who doesnt have problem with adobe. They take
monthly fee and updates to software are so minor especially on classic tools
like indesign and photoshop. They dont tackle the important hard problems like
performance and stability instead they add some new gimmicky features 5% of
users ever use and make new software that again anyone rarely uses (except XD
i guess). Adobe classic software has been on life support before the
subscriptions even started. Nobody was upgrading CS3 even ran much faster than
CS5 and had most of the features. Its probably the reason why they made the
subscriptions.

------
ur-whale
There's so many bad things to say about AutoDesk beyond the unhelpful/broken
"move to the cloud" ...

But if I had to pick one, it's AutoDesk's systematic attempt to build a closed
ecosystem à la FaceBook / Apple.

They do it, among other things, via tight control of the data file format, and
an ever-changing unpublished specification for those.

There was a time when there was decent exporters in AutoDesk products, so you
could move the data out to other (better) tools.

That era is long gone, they have been removing exporter modules to all but
their own formats.

Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare.

One thing that I find really frustrating about this is the bitrot that ensues.
Better not hope to load work you did 10-15 years ago to get something useful
out of it. That use case is not part of the AutoDesk plan.

~~~
fsloth
"Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare."

At least you can do it on a non-Autodesk affiliated software stack that more-
or-less works [https://www.opendesign.com/](https://www.opendesign.com/)

~~~
rurban
Nowadays you don't have to pay ODA anymore when can use GPL-3 LibreDWG. In the
end opensource CAD will win, but it's still a long march.

~~~
fsloth
If the options are to hook up to GPL-3 or pay ODA quite few software products
probably go the ODA way still. ODA has quite a large development org to
support their stack. I presume if maximum feature parity with DXF was a
requirement then ODA would still win.

Open source is really great for innovation. I don't see much innovation or
excitement in reverse engineering a stone-age proprietary black-box format.

It would be much better if those efforts were spent in an open source data
interchange format.

~~~
rurban
DXF is a too stupid and irregular format, JSON is much more regular and easier
to read and write.

There are several open source alternative formats, but I never warmed up to
them. They look very overarchitectured, like XML. But maybe I'll have to do
some IFC converters later.

With all the constraints, dynamic blocks, mesh and solid formats it's very
diverse, and Acad's new constraints system is extremely baroque and
undocumented. A big C++ mess. Dynblocks and meshes also.

ACIS is extremely nice though. I recently reverse engineered their new
ShapeManager format, which is just binary ACIS (SAB) plus history (ACSH).

------
aut0away
It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while
secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them.

Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max _and_ Maya. Enough
said.

~~~
bschne
Is rhino actually used for serious CAD work? From what I‘ve read/heard I
thought it was mostly something used in student projects or design
explorations because of grasshopper‘s visual programming functionality

~~~
jacquesm
Yes it is. I've seen it used professionally at more than one company.

~~~
saeranv
Depends on the firm, but it's definitely used. Specifically Rhino/Grasshopper
get used a lot for concept, schematic design, and then Revit gets used for
design development and onward, especially at companies that work a lot with
complex geometry (Zaha, SHoP).

~~~
bschne
That makes sense, I have no clue about how architects actually work but I
imagine Revit et al. have a ton of features that you would probably miss in
Rhino when it gets to working out the nitty-gritty details of floorplans,
generating section drawings, or working with BIM features?

~~~
CositaS
[https://www.visualarq.com/](https://www.visualarq.com/) adds BIM tools to
Rhino (and the total price of _perpetual_ licenses for Rhino+VisualARQ is
still significantly less than a year's Revit subscription)

~~~
saeranv
Sounds perfect, but I've yet to hear of any company using this plug-in!

Personally I also have hope for the interesting hybrids that are continually
coming out that are trying to create a seamless pipeline between Revit and
Rhino: Google's Flux (which failed), Speckle, RhinoInside.

I also hacked up my own crude solution, which was to continually run a flask
server in the background, and then pass json strings between Rhino, Revit, and
Jupyter. I do a lot of analysis work (building energy and environmental
simulation/optimization), so wanted a solution that gave me access to the
scientific python ecosystem.

------
buovjaga
Would be great, if architects invested in free & open source software:

[https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre](https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre)

[https://blenderbim.org/](https://blenderbim.org/)

[https://community.osarch.org/](https://community.osarch.org/)

~~~
wappa
They are so bad, it's not worth learning those tools, or even using them for
hobby/home projects.

~~~
buovjaga
Are you arguing that the fundamental design choices in the code architectures
are so bad that it is not worth investing in development? If so, what are you
basing your claim on?

------
muska3
The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match
them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use
compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this
software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.

~~~
donquichotte
It's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software
development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better
than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD
software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who
know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care
about mechanical CAD is just too small for a successful open source effort.

Yes, there is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, but every time I try to use them, I give
up in the end and whip up something in Fusion360.

~~~
pjmlp
Except that they are not.

Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when
some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are
using gfortran.

Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't
upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for
their own toolchains.

In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in collaboration with IBM tend
to make use of xlc.

No JIT compiler, or GC implementations, for the pure open source managed
runtimes tend to be on the same ball park of the work going on Java, .NET and
JavaScript, all sponsored by deep pockets corporations.

No CUDA based open source clone beats NVidia and PGI compilers targeting
NVidia hardware.

What most open source compilers have is good enough performance so that a
large part of the dev population, that isn't willing to pay for tooling,
doesn't care anyway.

~~~
sitkack
At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from
proprietary to OSS with a different makefile.

OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that
are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.

~~~
vonmoltke
> At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from
> proprietary to OSS with a different makefile.

Assuming you don't rely on compiler-specific features.

------
wappa
The moat autodesk has is surreal. In AEC atleast, students learn with Autodesk
softwares in university and colleges.

The softwares (autocad, revit, maya, etc., many others) itself is complex,
require domain know-how to build competing product. I don't see how anyone can
compete with them anymore.

They have the industry by the balls, and they know it. Competing against
Autodesk is like competing against Google in search.

------
duncanawoods
Something mildly related which I found interesting from a recent talk by Ryan
Singer is that Christopher Alexander of "Pattern Language" fame create some
unusual architectural design software called GateKeeper that guides sketching
based on prompts from a pattern language:

Gatekeeper demo:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq6yKyauu-o)

Ryan Singer's talk "Christopher Alexander: A Primer"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsTZXT0FlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsTZXT0FlM)

------
dirtyid
Most buildings today can still be effective designed and constructed from
pen+paper drafting technology that adhere pre computer-revolution standards.
They're not F35s. My understanding from architects/professors 20 years ago is
the education pipelines has dramatically shifted away from practical training
(i.e just solid drafting skills) while remaining some of the longer
professional/masters programs. Most graduate simply aren't very technical in
the first place and nature of work allows you to get away with it. Trades +
associated industries involved in actual building aren't much better. Many in
the industry, most are not what you consider "developer" types eager to adopt
new technical features and workflows. There's just too much conservative
regulations and stubborn old hands at the top of the industry.

Compared to other design fields where technical tools are everything for
actually making the thing, there's a lot more excitement and experimentation
in software progression in those industries, many of which are _tiny_ compared
to the behemoth that is global building/construction industry. That said, Arch
software aren't bad, they're serviceable but extremely unexciting. Adobes SaaS
is pretty shit but they occasionally introduce "thank god" features that makes
tasks 10 years ago 10X easier, can't really say the same for Revit and
associated arch software with exception of ArchViz software since that just
cannibalizes from rendering industry.

~~~
Dork1234
Depends on the firm. Zaha Hadid software requirements would make your head
spin. You are clearly not producing any of her (and her teams) buildings with
only Pen and Paper.

~~~
dirtyid
Starchitects who can get parametric designs built for $$$ are outliers, and
considering how these buildings have failed to perform in real life,
computation is a enabling a lot of bad designs. I know ppl that that interned
at Hadid 15 years ago, they mostly just used Rhino / Maya and dodgy exports to
cad for construction drawings. The real software dependency is all the
structural analysis behind the scene to optimize design for costs, the former
can be negated via expensive overengineering, so the latter is ultimately what
makes these designs buildable in market economies.

------
KaiserPro
I used to work for The foundry (now foundry.com) Who i believe are the last
people to "beat" autodesk at their own game(well discreet).

Autodesk sold Flint/Flame/Inferno, which are high end compositor systems
(Think photoshop but for movies) They were expensive bis of kit.

Foundry's nuke is a program that runs on normal workstations and doesn't
require any special hardware to run (it also means that it can't run in real
time like the Flames could)

What was the secret to Nuke's success? It was cheaper than flame, it was
equally as capable, and apple killed Shake. We worked closely with the artists
to put in features that wanted. Offered discounts for volume (standard)
offered brilliant support[1], and was generally far more responsive than
autodesk (who basically only shipped a patch if you were ILM)

Foundry is the incumbent now, and is being eaten by fusion (ironically,
considering we pretty much drove them out of buisness)

[1] including fixing a script that made a "magic wand" for a sexy version of
harry potter.

It might have changed, but when I was there the support was top notch.

------
tannhaeuser
Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software,
but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and
expensive, a key step is settling on a standard format for data exchange. When
and during the time Google owned SketchUp, they made Collada/.dae export part
of the community product, and eg Blender has really great support for Collada
import (worked out of the box for a non-trivial project of mine - thx Blender
and SketchUp/Google!). Of course, meanwhile SketchUp has been discontinued as
a free desktop product (being offered only as online hobby software for 3D
printing models, like Tinkercad, instead), and Autodesk has introduced FBX as
oh-so-much better alternative. I'm just saying that if you want competition
and innovation, as a customer you must demand open standards and use workflows
based on open file formats to get anywhere.

~~~
fsloth
There are many standards. Unfortunately the most used ones are called DXF
(Autocad file) and RVT (Revit file).

There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes)

Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.

~~~
rjsw
The exchange file formats for IFC use the same syntax as those for STEP. The
models could have been the same too but the people behind IFC wanted to do
their own thing.

~~~
fsloth
The exchange format is irrelevant, it's the schema that matters, though. IFC
does have XML serialization as well.

------
alkonaut
If people didn’t use Autodesk’s software I wouldn’t have to pay a surreal
amount of money to use their binary API so my cad program can write DWG.

But the fact is DWG is _the_ de facto standard in so many engineering
disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted
and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation
of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep changing it slightly every
year, so a third party implementation would always be slightly behind.

This type of moat is exactly the type of moat every business dreams of and
tries to create, and the only reason it’s bad when Autodesk does it is because
they are so big it actually hurts competition on a large scale.

I can’t see a good “open” replacement for DWGs (DXF, IFC, ...) on the horizon,
sadly.

~~~
rurban
LibreDWG comes to rescue, and for better formats JSON is widely used.

~~~
alkonaut
There are multiple open reverse-engineer efforts, but Autodesk changes the
format every single year, and customers expect to be able to read drawings
immediately in the latest format. This is deliberate by Autodesk I think.

LibreDWG is also GPL I believe with no option for commercial?

~~~
rurban
Autodesk changes the format only every 3 years, and since r2007 the changes
were minimal. Haven't looked into the r2021 changes yet.

Afaik only LibreDWG matches Acad and ODA/Theiga, the rest does only DXF, no
DWG write and a minimal numbers of objects.

LibreDWG only offers GPL, but many CAD packages thrive with the GPL: Qcad,
FreeCad, SolveSpace, Blender.

~~~
alkonaut
They release their own library (ObjectARX/RealDWG) yearly in sync with the
AutoCad releases, and at least call the format “DWg 2018“,2019,2020 and so on.
The library (I think) refuses to open a 2019 file with version 2018. Even if
the problem just occurred every 3 years that too would be unacceptable of
course.

We are developing a proprietary bespoke program, it’s not possible to use GPL
style licenses, nor will the niche filfilled by it ever be filled by an OSS
program.

------
yholio
You see this pattern for all professional tools, which have a very narrow
expert audience. After a period of open competition, that for most fields
ended in the 80s and 90s, a closed source competitor emerges which becomes the
industry standard. Massive moats, file formats, plugin investment, teaching of
the tools in schools etc. prevent real competition, and the company becomes a
fantastic cash cow. In the last decade most transitioned to the software as a
service model, to better extract the rent they think they are "due" from the
professional community.

This is the type of setting where open source simply cannot subsist: the
professional users are usually not programmers, the number of people using the
features is limited (but for them, they are essential) and the expertise to
develop them is very specialized. Furthermore, clients rarely need customized
development done. Therefore, no developer community can form around an open-
source competitor, comprised of either enthusiasts or professional providers
of open source solutions. Photoshop vs. Gimp is a good example of all these
pathologies.

I think the solution to such problems would be marrying the open source
philosophy with the commercial solution that allows developers to charge for
licensing. We give up the „free to use” liberty for a limited time, allowing
the "open" source developer to charge for the software like a commercial
software vendor. Source is provided, and all contributors can operate on
similar terms, charging for their patch for a limited time.

After 3-5 years, the license reverts to a GPL compatible, that allows anyone
the full four liberties, or, at their discretion, fork a commercial-open-
source competitor for another 5 years period.

This way, a flagship commercial product could be developed by a company that
attracts the most users and has the best features, and that company has a
number of years to recoup it's investment by making it's userbase pay for
those features in licensing fees. Once it's exclusivity period ends, in order
to maintain it's commercial dominance the company must innovate and improve
the product, otherwise people would use an older version for free, or a
competitor can emerge that can disrupt its rent seeking by forking the old
version as a new „commercial open source” project with it's own 5 year
exclusivity period.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You mean something a bit like - what's the word? - a patent?

That won't solve the problem, because this is not a software problem. It's an
economic problem.

To maximise profit you need to dominate a market by 1) locking out competitors
2) forcing customers to give you money 3) spending as little as possible on
continued development.

This happens because that's how capitalism works. It's an inevitable
consequence. Effectively it becomes a form of rent-seeking, where corporations
charge their "tenants" money for access to a resource. And as long as the
product sort of works some of the time corporations can claim customers are
getting something of value.

But really these corporations are like bad landlords, charging users a huge
monthly rent and never fixing the leaky roof.

The answer would be more along the lines of a user's association - effectively
a "union" for users which was prepared to fight aggressive and expensive class
actions to challenge ridiculous licensing terms and make corporations
accountable for consequential damage and lost time caused by bugs.

This may sound extreme, but when there's no competition - because competing
products have been bought and shut down or left to rot - it's a de facto
antitrust situation. Governments are unlikely to enforce this, so class
actions to challenge unreasonable contract terms and assert that in fact there
_are_ obligations towards users may be the only way to fix this.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Excuse me. This is not intrinsically how capitalism works. Capitalism can
exist in free and non-free markets. Capitalism in a free market is efficient
if property rights which exist and are enforced, there are low barriers to
entry, and there are low transaction costs. You have just described capitalism
with barriers to entry. At this point you have left free-market capitalism,
and entered a world with no particular term of art describing it. I would say
it is best called by an epithet like "crony capitalism."

The operation of free markets is Intro to Econ material. You should pursue a
remedial course that you may understand this before proposing remedies,
because while some of your proposed remedies hit near the mark, I think this
is by accident.

The most effective remedy is competition, achieved once you can dismantle the
barriers to entry. You mention antitrust in passing, which is the key policy-
based approach, and regulatory provisions against trusts are mentioned in
passing in the article — but mostly you focus on a "union" of customers, and I
have grave doubts to its efficacy in practice. There is a massive coordination
problem here, thousands of firms and their legal departments who must agree to
risk substantial consequences individually in order (denying themselves key
software) to achieve the collective goal.

~~~
jessaustin
Before prescribing remedial education, perhaps you could consider the root
word of "capitalism" a bit more carefully? "Capital" has its own interests,
but those don't include free markets, which latter I hope we can agree is more
important for the innovation upon which humanity relies. Properly understood,
all "capitalism" is eventually revealed as what you're calling "crony
capitalism". Temporarily the owners of capital and their sockpuppets might
have to pretend to value free markets. Unless the local political or ethical
system is quite incorruptible, capitalists' true colors are eventually seen.
After all, they have the money, by definition. Many people will do unethical
things (e.g. write tax codes under which corporations pay no taxes) in
exchange for money.

~~~
fennecfoxen
What you describe isn't a "capital" thing. What you describe is a "power"
thing. It describes princes and bureaucracies at least as well as it does
capital, and there are plenty of investments into capital in the world which
do _not_ take place at these massive scales (indeed, probably the majority).

This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government
interventions to "fix" this concentration of power, delivering it into the
hands of even-more-powerful politicians.

~~~
jessaustin
OK, sure, royalty is also bad. We're not talking about that, and we're not
talking about e.g. a small shop owner plowing some profits back into
improvements to her shop or whatever you mean by "investments into capital".
We're talking about the owners of vast wealth, and what they have done from
the moment they or their ancestors acquired that vast wealth. They treat
customers (and employees) as property and their custom (and labor) as rents to
which capitalists are due by birthright, which is not humane.

Now I realize, it's a bit silly to invoke such high-minded concepts in defense
of the commercial interests of a group who themselves enjoy a lucrative state-
supplied professional monopoly. Architects who don't like the terms under
which software is available should hire some programmers. Programmers don't
have a monopoly from the state, so as Autodesk knows they are relatively
cheaper to hire than architects. If the architects try to lobby their way to a
better commercial circumstance, which the effort described in TFA seems to
indicate they will, they're likely to find themselves out-bribed by their
monopolist vendor. I'm just opposed to attempted re-definitions of the word
"capitalism". It is what we have seen it always to be, nothing more and
nothing less.

------
contingencies
Check out [http://www.osarch.org/](http://www.osarch.org/) which is a quite
vibrant community of open source architecture software and users.

Architects can use Blender. It has better BIM support than all the commercial
offerings, better rendering, is free, stable, cross-platform, etc. Not
brilliant on drawing output, but that is under active development and is
already OK. You can also export to FreeCAD and then do drawings from there.

------
stadt
An interesting counterpoint comes from Autodesk Life Sciences which outlines
the need for Bio/Nano software development:
[https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-018-2009-5](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-018-2009-5)

Abstract: "There is a digital revolution taking place and biotechnology
companies are slow to adapt. Many pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and
industrial bio-production companies believe that software must be developed
and maintained in-house and that data are more secure on internal servers than
on the cloud. In fact, most companies in this space continue to employ large
IT and software teams and acquire computational infrastructure in the form of
in-house servers. This is due to a fear of the cloud not sufficiently
protecting in-house resources and the belief that their software is valuable
IP. Over the next decade, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market
conditions, with agile software teams, will quickly become a compelling
competitive advantage. Biotechnology companies that do not adopt the new
regime may lose on key business metrics such as return on invested capital,
revenue, profitability, and eventually market share."

------
CaliforniaKarl
I'm surprised nobody in the Eurozone has raised similar issues about Adobe.

~~~
sfvisser
Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US
monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an
environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US.

And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil
liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source
alternatives.

The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form a threat to European
citizens is because for some reasons we have zero local alternatives.

~~~
jacquesm
Europe does build its own software. And anything even remotely successful then
gets acquired by some US entity.

~~~
iagovar
This has been a common theme. Dassault owns CATIA and Solidworks tough, and
they've been used a lot in Europe.

~~~
ur-whale
Ever tried to use CATIA?

Best thing there is if you want a head trip back to the 70's

~~~
iagovar
Probably, but Solidworks is quite well regarded.

------
milansuk
Here is the actual Open Letter to Autodesk: [https://letters-to-
autodesk.com/](https://letters-to-autodesk.com/)

I never saw website, where homepage is pdf.

~~~
chrstphrknwtn
It's not a website. It's a webdoc? I think this is amazing. Who says the root
of a domain has to return an index.html?

------
Dork1234
I do not feel bad about these Architects, they knew exactly what Autodesk was
going to do with Revit when they acquired the company. Autodesk did the same
thing with AutoCAD. Reduce innovation, and increased subscription cost. These
architecture firms need to diversify the their software toolset, have more in
house developers, push for more open standards, and fund open source tools.
Instead they take the easy route and standardize on a close tool, until the
point where Autodesk has a monopoly.

~~~
fsloth
Even though a logistics company uses trucks it does not mean they could build
and operate a fleet of trucks.

You presume architecture firms would have any sort of capability to operate in
software development. You might as well say they should create their own ink
and papers. Software engineering companies are savvy in software.

Other companies aren't, and it is not expected that they would have any
competence beyond their core offering.

~~~
FormFollowsFunc
Larger architectural firms like Zaha Hadid and Foster and Partners have
developers in-house who work on internal tools for designers. Though I don’t
know how many firms there are like this. Though I think architects in general
have been lazy when it comes to tooling. The CGI industry has been far more
involved in tools and open standards.

------
senectus1
Anything Autodesk is a lic to print money. Same goes for Bentley systems.

sob's will bend you over a barrel without hesitation.

------
bfuclusion
I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer
requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs
to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format,
EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money
than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

~~~
fsloth
It's quite hard to develop software by just throwing money at it. And even
harder when the domain is a bit niche and a bit esoteric so your hiring will
be even harder. The optimal person would be a game dev with a penchant for
math and a MSc in an engineering field. And you would like to have a team of
these, please.

Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse
experience to start with you'll have to spend a few years just building the
initial team unless you find a really good headhunter.

In CAD you have to combine at least two non-trivial[0] discipline, computer
graphics and and computational geometry. And they are completely unlike
'normal' software fields where you can just plug in various third party
components and call it a day. You have to write your stuff to a great extent.
And you have to design it - there are not that many public examples of how to
put such a thing together.

It's not magic, it's not intrinsically very deep, but it's complex in the
sense that the systems that have to interact are far and wide. It needs a lot
of work.

And there are lots of things that are not in books, you just have to
understand how they go together and which ways to do things are better than
others.

[0] Non-trivial as in "I'll just figure it out" vs. "I'll have to pour through
a few decades of academia and industry research and technical publications
plus scour obscure websites" to get a clue on what the state of the art is and
where it could go on from here

~~~
Animats
Autodesk has gone "software as a service". For a long time they sold boxed
software. But that market is over. So they went to "software as a service".
That can get very expensive for users. That's apparently the real customer
complaint.

I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion
360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the
animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias
and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer
graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a
badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that
is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked
up Maya.

Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then
they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid,
which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing
stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no
idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.

Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by
itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.

Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now
they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade
animation business.

A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural
tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light
fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished
building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your
design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it
was ahead of its time 20 years ago.

On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is
hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a
chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much.
This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and
"just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff
geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the
Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel
with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a
new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing
consistent.

(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the
company for decades.)

~~~
imtringued
As a FreeCAD user I don't understand why FreeCAD absolutely despises chamfers
and fillets. The dedicated chamfer and fillet tools are just bad. I can do the
fillet by hand without any problems. Just create a sketch and revolve the cut
or sweep the cut along the chamfered edge. Works perfectly fine but it takes
much longer than it should.

~~~
floatboth
PartDesign chamfer/fillet are so much better in git master now. No longer
limited to 45 degrees, and they can be duplicated with linear/polar patterns!

------
geokon
Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal?

I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his
website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just
straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm
just wondering what the legal mechanism is

~~~
pyb
Not everybody likes to hear it, but archive.is is an illegal operation. In
some countries, posting archive.is links may even be illegal as well (it might
be interpreted by a court as "Aiding and Abetting Criminal Copyright
Infringement")

~~~
syshum
how i archive.is illegal but Way Back machine not? Seems odd that you isolate
a single archive service as illegal instead of saying "Internet Archiving is
an illegal operation"

~~~
pyb
Archive.is bypasses paywalls and does not honor takedown requests. Copyright
infringement is what it's designed for.

As you said, bona fide archiving happens on archive.org

~~~
syshum
I disagree that the purpose of archive.is is "Copyright infringement", I have
argued the archive.org should not honor take down requests and should
challenge them in court, as it ceased to be a true archive if at anytime
anyone can just remove things they do not like from the archive. DMCA abuse on
archive.org is a real problem for controversial issues today

------
Mc_Big_G
$22 million over 5 years = $4.4 million /year

$4.4 million/year / 25 companies = $176,000 / year / company

So, these companies are complaining about spending $176k/year on the most
critical software they use to run their business? I'd wager they spend more on
company parties than they do on Revit. I'd also wager what they're REALLY
pissed about is being forced to move to SaaS and the crackdown by Autodesk on
pirating their software. Autodesk is arguably the most pirated business
software of all time. They estimate something like 70%+ of their installs are
pirated.

If Revit is really as terrible as they say it is, Autodesk should write an
open letter agreeing with them and quadrupling the price to improve it. These
firms make hundreds of millions of dollars every year and they're complaining
about < $200k for business critical software. It's absurd.

