Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is top-notch software. Well, PRO/Engineer is, anyway. The last shop I worked at used Cadence but we had a lot of PRO/E CAD people who had come from Lockheed-Martin.
OTOH, this is not cheap software. Usually several thousand $$ a seat.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
when I used to work at PTC customers where always asking about this and of course since it is working closely with HP odds are it will be Debian that will be officialy supported with it. There is a *huge* market for this. I'm sure many of my old friends are *very* happy.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
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.)
This is great news, the engineering crowd has been stuck with MS for a while now. The Linux CAD area is one place where we could use some support. This is not a slam on the CAD stuff that's out there, but Pro-E is in a different league.
Pro-E is also VERY expensive when compared with the other CAD packages though....I'd really like to see Solidworks for Linux. I could TOTALY walk away from MS if that happened. I imagine that there are a lot of engineering operations that could do it too. All Linux workstations, no MS anywhere from the engineering office all the way out to the production floor.
I've recently written to the folks at Solidworks too, sort of the "....I'm really interested and would buy seats now if I had the opportunity..." No reply.
How about a really "kick-ass" engineering document control program to go with that?...I was just thinking about that last night, something to compete with Agile and the like.....
I have been in ASIC engineering for the past 11 years. I have seen things moving towards Linux as the underlying OS for the past 2-3 years.
It appears to go hand in hand with the fastest uniprocessor platforms looking fast compared to the fastest uniprocessor suns.
The software we use is very expensive and generally compute intensive. So it pays to run it on the fastest hardware and it pays to buy the fastest hardware when it is the cheapest. The only exceptions are tools that require 64 bit addresses to permit enough memory to be installed (E.G. IC layout). Sun still wins there.
When PCs are both the fastest and cheapest and Unix is the operating system of choice for engineers and Linux is both free and good, the preference is obvious.
We pretty much will not buy software that does not run on Linux and the ASIC tool vendors know it.
The same market forces seem to apply in here mechanical engineering.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
For all you non-mechanical engineer types, Pro/Engineer is a 3-d modeling tool. The other big ones out there are SolidWorks (which is hugely popular, mostly due to its lower cost, but similar quality) and at a lower scale, AutoCad Mechanical Desktop/Inventor.
As an aside, Cadence generally doesn't do mechanical modeling software. They do PCB design, schematic entry, simulation and of course IC design and verification.
This is news, but for most Linux users, forget about buying Pro/E. It costs big time - and the companies that use Pro/E already can afford bigtime boxes (Sparcs, etc) to run them on. Now if SolidWorks were to push into the Linux arena, things would start to get interesting...
ProE started on the Unix platform, then almost totally migrated to NT (and 2k). But they kept the same kind of interface, which needed some time to get used to (all menus in a single window, the next of which overlaps the previous...). They had the potential to really take the market with their parametric technology, which was a lot more advanced than what AutoCad could (can) offer. But then some other ones rose...
Personnally, I'm leaning towards SolidWorks. The licensing costs are smaller than those of the competition, and it's very pleasant to work with. Very Windows-centric, but the interface is fast to get accustomed to.
And it impossible to pass by Catia V5. The precedent versions were almost exclusively Unix-based, but they also made the switch to NT. The interface is really nice (reminiscent of XP, but a few years before). Pleasant to use, but V5 is still being developped, so the stability on the latest release is not always top notch.
There's also Autodesk's Inventor, although I never used it personally.
Of course, then there's the support for third-parties modules. This can hurt initialy the introduction of a new platform (CAD or HW).
Kudos to PTC for bringing their product to Linux. I know there's been some people asking them to do it for a few years now. But one has to wonder if it's because they feel some pressure to maintain their share of the market.
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.
Why oh why has Autocad not been released for Linux?
AutoCAD used to be available for a number of the proprietary *nixes (Solaris, SGI IRIX, HP/UX, etc) back in the Release 10, 11, 12 (and early R13) days. People I used to know that worked at AutoDesk used to make sort of veiled hints that Microsoft put some kind of pressure on them to quit supporting alternative platforms. More or less what they were saying is that AutoDesk was told if didn't quit supporting non-Microsoft platforms that Microsoft would enter the CAD market (possibly by buying up one of AutoDesk's competitors), or at least announce that they were going to, and that would kill AutoDesk by "giving away" the product. But of course nobody in those days would dare come right out and say something like that.
All it takes is one request from someone who will purchase enough seats.
IBM's Tivoli TME10 enterprise management suite (for all I know it's called something else now, but I'm too lazy to check) is supported on OS/2 primarily because of a single customer, the UK postal system. Everyone knew it would have to happen eventually, since IBM bought Tivoli and still had a strong commitment to OS/2 back in those days -- except, of course, for making it not suck. They didn't have that strong a commitment.
Incidentally, the linux port of tivoli was originally done by a support engineer with too much time on his hands. Ah, the wonders of using CORBA and perl.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Huh?!? I thought I'd heard they were planning this back in 1998 or 1999. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.
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.
Most of the Unix AutoCAD sales went to major accounts like government or aerospace/military. Around the time we started porting AutoCAD R13 to Unix Microsoft was making inroads selling Windows NT in those very same markets. To the pointy-haired IT managers it was a good excuse to get the engineers on the same type of systems the rest of the non-technical folks in these companies were using. And back in those days Unix workstations were priced quite high compared to WinTel hardware.
BTW, these ports were mostly paid for by the hardware manufacturers (i.e. Sun paid for the SunOS and Solaris ports, IBM for the AIX, etc.).
MS did pressure to prevent further development of a Mac port, however. One of the Mac programmers put a sign on his door: "Welcome to Autodesk--a division of Microsoft. Or it might as well be."
Nowadays the code base is so MS-centric it'd be difficult and expensive for AutoCAD to be ported to anything but Windows. And I'm sure MS would have a cow if Autodesk tried and would probably pressure to prevent, say, a Linux port. Now a Mac OS X port would be interesting. The Mac ports had a loyal following among Architects...
The threat of MS entering the CAD market was (is?) real and at one time was the biggest threat to Autodesk.
I still remember the new CEO getting rid of Ted Nelson and AMIX back in the early 90's--the thinking was that nothing would every become of this online hyperlinking stuff. Oh, well...can't win 'em all.
Well, I certainly won't be using it, then!
I can see the "Ask Slashdot" now: I manage a large aerospace machine shop and I'd like to run my shop on Linux. Is there an open-source 3D CAD/CAM program that will create NC programs that will properly control my 5-axis milling machines, lathes, and Okuma grinders? I hope to convince my managers this is a good idea!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
does anyone know if this software is functional for civil/environmental engineering-type drafting? (Drainage systems, bridges, feed lots, that sort of thing). I've been looking for such a linux solution due to the immense time investment that Windows takes to administer, and am wondering if there is a product that is similar in feature and similar in function to AutoCAD 2000 (due to the monkey-like nature of most of the engineering technicals employed at the company I work for, it's necessary to have something that will not cost a lot to retrain them on.)
Sorry if it's a bit incoherrent, it's been a long night and I'm exhausted.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers