Open Design Alliance Says Autodesk Infringes Copyright

If Autodesk's observation is correct that DWG still is singled out among all the other file formats, then it seems that with the change from Open DWG Alliance to Open Design Alliance the rules should have changed accordingly to be even-handed for all existing and potential new members. If all that were the case, how many software vendors would stay members of the Open Design Alliance? For us as CAD users it is important to be able to access process partners' CAD files with as little loss of information as possible. Usually that is only the case if the native file format is retained. Even more importantly we need to see those data in conjunction with the data that we work on --which excludes many of the publication formats as alternatives.

It's a funny one and nothing here is as straight as it seems. Members of the Alliance, like PTC don't have to open their file format up as being members, and they encrypt their format too. Bentley's DGN 'openness' here is protected by the Alliance as if AUtodesk wants to get access to the toolkit it has to join and thus divulge everything it knows about DWG - a double edged sword. DGN is also not a straightforward file format, even with DGN being documented, writing a DGN writer and reader from that is a very tough challenge, so was of low risk to make 'public'.
Being able to read DWG without AUtodesk's products is a business but Autodesk views the ODA as being there to gang up on it. I can see their point. But I can also see the benefit in having access to data without owning a vendor's product. The problem is nobody in this industry has has really got beyond thinking that proprietary file formats are of commercial advantage. Even with all this talk of openness and data sharing, it still boils down to the fact that customers and their data are their CAD vendor's bitch.

Posting a comment straight after such a 'classic Martyn' posting is surely a let-down but let's figure this: Adobe 'got it' real quick about documenting its PDF file format. I am no developer and thusly I am sure that PDF is very easy to implement compared to DGN as per Martyn's example, but as a businessperson I see that Adobe has benefitted from making PDF available. Yes, they did not document Illustrator or Photoshop, but they pretty much solved that with PDF and are still making heap-big profits. So why can't CAD companies 'get it' too?

Example: 3D XML - a 3D Publishing format owned by Dassault that promises openness in publishing of 3D data. Ralph has a great write up (http://go.cadwire.net/?8474,3,1) on why it isn't open.

RealDWG - way back when in 2005, Evan Yares pointed out that RealDWG is not available to competitors of Autodesk. (http://www.evanyares.com/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=399489&currentPage=11).