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..."

Comments

History....

[Rick Zeman]

...says it'll be Apple.

Better Apart from the Sinking SGI Ship

[DaRat]

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.

In a word,...

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:In a word,...

[Watts Martin]

I don't know. If Microsoft was particularly worried about Apple 'controlling' that market, they'd be more likely to buy a controlling interest in Avid, which they're already a heavy investor in. Remember, Microsoft actually owned Softimage for a few years.

I doubt the "private equity firm" is actually a major existing vendor in disguise, despite all the intrigue people can theorize on if it were. It's more likely to be a group like Vector Capital, the folks who bought Corel last year--in other words, a group that's, well, a private equity firm.

Re:Maya ain't free

[WiKKeSH]

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.

Apple is doing this!

[TheKidWho]

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

Re:Maya ain't free

[kidgenius]

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.

Maya on Linux

[PotatoHead]

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!