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Alias In Acquisition Talks With Private Equity Firm
TeachingMachines writes "Alias, the makers of the venerable Maya 3D animation and effects software, have announced their possible sale to an unnamed 3rd party, described as a 'leading private equity investment firm'. Alias is currently owned by SGI, and the transaction is still considered to be tentative. I, for one, hope that SGI holds onto Alias, as in its current state it is arguably the best 3D modelling and animation suite available, and it is available for Linux. Cross your fingers..."
...says it'll be Apple.
It's better if Alias separated itself from the sinking ship that is SGI. SGI is really losing its ability to hold onto any market share very quickly, and it's better that Alias avoids getting sucked down with SGI in an implosion.
control. Apple needs to control a market. They need it to walk away from Windows, and be able to pull it away from OSS. Steve has bought many of the other packages over the last 1.5 years. So yeah, I would agree with the parent that most likely it is Steve.
There is one problem with this. Jobs has been upfront with his buys. With the hiding and slinking going on, I would suspect that it is Gates doing it to make sure that Apple does not control a market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
it is under a starightfoward license.
their free version (as in cost) is closed, but free (as in cost).
their commercial version is closed, but it will cost you.
the only difference is that the free version places a watermark on the finished product.
noone's "pussyfooting around the whole oss issue". this clearly has nothing to do with open source software.
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I bet you Apple is the un named third party. This year they are going to have a HUGE presence at SIGGRAPH 04, and I bet you this is one of those reasons. Apple is looking for domintation in markets it currently has an edge in, namely music production and video production. And Apple seems to be doing this job very well. Coupled with Renderman for the G5, and Shake + Final Cut Pro + Maya + Renderman + Logic Pro, and the mac does everything you need for movie production
They should name it "Good for learning how to model, but trying to do anything with lighting or textures is not going to happen". But even on that note, if you can't see a final render of the model, how are you supposed to learn how to even model?
It wouldn't likely be Microsoft.
They owned SoftImage for a while (Alias' main competition at the time) and it didn't work out.
pussyfooting around the whole OSS issue How the hell is Maya "pussyfooting" around OSS? It isnt' OSS. MatLAB makes a linux version that you can only buy. B/c they are closed source and making software for linux means they are pussyfooting around something? Just b/c someone makes software for an OSS OS (gnu/linux) does not mean that they have to give their software out for free.
Open Source Maya? The source code is huge, probably bigger than several Linux distros.
Probably few could build it. Or even download it. Although you would like a free copy,
open source isn't the answer to everything, especially large mission critical, highly complex applications.
SGI in their hayday was a very cool company. That's what the sad part about it is. They've given so much to the computer industry that if there were to be saints of the computer world, SGI would surely be the biggest patron saint.
I realized they were going down some time in 1998. This realization came when a spokesman for DeVry came to my high school. Apparently, SGI had partnered with them. The people in their introductional video were clearly idiots... These were the people that wanted to work in IT because they wanted the money, not because they love computers or technology. The moths to the dotcom flame, you might say.
It was somewhat depressing, as I wanted to go work for them at some point, just to be immersed in the creative genius SGI housed. The DeVry thing to me was the totem above their grave.
Of course, around this time SGI started pushing their NT machines. That only confirmed the direction they were going. Too bad.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
That the Linux port would get dropped, considering the mainline players running
it on Linux... ILM - Weta and others, the pressure would be somewhat intense....
(Unless of course it is M$ Attempting more rool da world tactics)
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will stay.
The big studios want it too much. Using Maya on OS X is as sweet, or sweeter than either win32 or Linux, but I think Linux will scale farther for back end tasks, at a lower cost, than OS X ever will.
Scaling is one of the top drivers for the big boys in this game. Linux has both win32 and OS X beat in the price / performance area cold.
Besides a lot of what the studios want is custom. SGI used to offer this under NDA, but it cost a lot. With Linux, they can do it far cheaper, on their time schedule, and share the bits that benefit everyone without having to repurchase and pay support on their own tech!
Blogging because I can...
It'd make little sense to simply cut off this marketshare, and I doubt Apple would turn their backs on the profits available, even to drive sales of Macs.
Hah! Apple already did this with Logic. The windows version of Logic was selling more copies than the Mac version, that didn't stop Apple from cutting sales in more than HALF by dropping the windows version completely.
I have no doubt that Apple would drop Linux and Windows support for Maya in a heartbeat if they ever bought it.
maya complete - $2000
maya unlimited - $7000
3ds max - $3500
character studio - $1000
maya complete doesn't have all of the features of 3ds max. in order to get it all, you need to get maya unlimited, which is thousands more than max, even if you add in character studio. also, they have different strengths, weaknesses and workflows. people should get whatever suits them. any person who prefers one program can point out the feature their package has or what's lacking in another.
if someone's going to pirate one, it is just as easy to pirate the other, so that argument doesn't really mean much. discreet makes gmax, which can be used to make models for game mods.
you probably shouldn't have read this.