Autodesk Suing to Keep Format Closed

An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."

Comments

version for Linux ..

[rs232]

According to this Wikipeda article there used to be versions for Unix and Macintosh but was dropped in the 1980s.

molecular modeling comparison

[cashman73]

Never used AutoCAD, so I could care less whether it's got a proprietary file format or not. In drug design and molecular modeling, the two most commonly used software programs for 3-D modeling are Sybyl and Insight II. Sybyl's native file format is mol2 , and Insight II's is car/mdf . Both programs also fully support the industry standard pdb format. All three files are simple text files, nothing proprietary about them. Insight II will write a mol2 file with no problems, and vice versa. There are also several third party applications that handle and read/write mol2 and car/mdf files. Nobody's really complaining.