The board of directors of the Open Design Alliance has put Executive Director Evan Yares on administrative leave. ODA board chairman Arnold van der Weide, president of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC), is temporarily running the organization.
Reached by phone at his residence, Yares would only confirm the transition, and otherwise had no comment. Van der Weide is in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada for the IntelliCAD World Meeting, which starts later this morning, as is this reporter. Van der Weide has so far been unavailable for comment. [Update: van der Weide has confirmed the transition but makes no other comment. -- Editor]
Rumors have been circulating for months about internal problems within the Alliance. AECnews can confirm that an embezzlement investigation involving ODA funds is underway, and that Yares is not considered a suspect. The amount of money at issue is over $500,000. There is also concern within the ODA board regarding Yares’s business relationships beyond the ODA, which sources say represent a potential conflict of interest. When asked about this, Yares had no comment. Yares was asked to step aside recently in an icy conference call meeting of the Alliance board to which Yares was reportedly flanked by a parliamentary procedure expert and a lawyer.
The Open Design Alliance is a non-profit alliance of software firms and CAD users. It creates a reverse-engineered version of the DWG file format popularized by Autodesk AutoCAD and used by most AutoCAD competitors. The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium publishes IntelliCAD, an AutoCAD clone, and related software tools. The ITC is a member of the ODA; many software companies in the CAD industry belong to both organizations.
--RSN