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Pro/Engineer Coming to Linux
PotatoHead writes "
Parametric Technologies Corporation
(PTC) announced in a recent
press release, a Linux port of their flagship modeling product Pro
Engineer. HP will be the preferred partner for the Linux platform
release. This is pretty big news for the engineering and product design
crowd folks. There must be some fairly credible requests coming in for
this to happen."
So, they are officially supporting Linux as a target platform, because they recognize it can have a lower TCO.
Which is true, of course, if they have UNIX expertise in-house. MCSEs are a dime a dozen, but good UNIX admins are quite expensive. If you go the consulting route, you get screwed with huge fees. If you train your personell, you get screwed with long courses and a decent change they simply won't get it.
Then again, if you have a competent staff or a big budget, *nix all the way. I know firsthand that the grass really is greener on the *nix side of the fence, but sometimes that's not feasible for large corporations. (Besides, many corporations are brainless and/or inflexible, and won't switch away from their Novell file servers, Lotus Notes 2.0, and NT 3.51, but they have bigger problems.)
Because you are what we like to wrong. Pro/E is a full fledgled application. The reason there is no serious OSS CAD app is because the math and engineering knowledge needed to do this is not something a group of coders can do in their spare time. Also starting with 2000 and 2000i PTC started making the file formats binary in order to decrease size. I do know that they are willing to work with just about anyone who wants to be able to import Pro/E files into another app. So if you where able to write a OSS solid modeling kernel they would most likely be happy to help you make it able to import Pro/E files and of course they can export to *many* different formats. Just ask me about it a big part of my old job was figuring out import/export problems.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
No. The desire for this is huge. There already a lot of firms using ProE who have to put up with many development environments because it wasn't a Linux option. Of course, some are willing to put up with VMWare-ing it but thats a PITA.
Anyone who reads mailing lists or newsgroups knows how much people have been screaming for this. Just in case anyone was wondering, this might be one of those breakthrough apps that gives Linux mountains of credibility at the enterprise/collaberation level. This will probably help draw more developers to the platform; also something we could always use more of.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
The reason these engineering packages moved to Windows from Unix in the first place is that it was so much cheaper. The advantage of NT was that you could run these apps on cheap, commodity hardware, and a relatively cheap OS. The alternatives back then were commercial, proprietary Unix on expensive workstations from SGI, DEC, HP, or whoever. NT boxes cost less than half as much, and could be run by the average office's "computer whiz" (or at least that was the perception).
Since then, Linux has taken over, with the ability to run on the same cheap hardware. But now it doesn't matter as much- the savings are in the hundreds, rather than thousands, or tens of thousands per year, per seat. Compared to the cost of these apps and the salaries of the people using them, that's a drop in the bucket. Windows may not be cheap or good compared to Linux, but in the overall scheme of things it's cheap enough, and good enough.