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Autodesk + Instructables: For Makers?
ptorrone writes "MAKE magazine has published an in-depth look at what the recent acquisition of Instructables by Autodesk means for makers and the DIY movement. MAKE suggests it wasn't about getting the millions of members or projects at Instructables or upselling Autodesk tools. Instead, the acquisition was more about creating many Instructable-like communities around Autodesk's new free and trial tools including their 3D printing site and service, Autodesk123D."
There are three companies that would be worse than Autodesk in this role:
1. DSS.
2. Altium.
3. Microsoft.
I mean, of all things, Autodesk? The guys who make poorly designed, expensive CAD program that only keeps its market dominance because of its semi-documented, closed file format? One that ported its engine to OSX but "forgot" to bring any of the modules that make their software in any way useful?
That never ever touched Linux (and is worse than Solidworks with Wine)? That abandoned all Unix ports of their software many, many versions ago? (well, Pro/Engineer and CATIA bested them by abandoning an existing Linux port, apparently just to spite users).
That never did, nor ever promised to give a fuck about any "community" other than corporate managers who make purchasing decisions?
That never ever open sourced anything?
That thinks, anyone sane would use crippled "free" tools specifically made to frustrate the user, to do design of anything that matters?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This report of the sale of Instructables to Autodesk makes it clear to me that the free software community needs a common drawing data structure and a set of user drawing interchange utilities.
The world of free drafting and CAD doesn't have the many little component drawings available to the users of AutoCAD proprietary drafting software. From the previous poster's comments, AutoDesk is unlikely to make any user data files or data structure information more available in the future.
I just finished spending 2 months reviewing many of the free CAD programs. I am looking for programs and applications to design a solar water heater installation, a radio antenna, a fractal made out of wire, an electrical circuit and a wagon. Is there anything yet to match sheets of quad paper, a .5 mm mechanical pencil and a HP-48 calculator and some assorted handbooks?
What AutoDesk seems to have, that is never released by AutoDesk, is the Autocad user drawing data structure and the little drawings of ready to use components.
What is missing from PythonCAD, Qcad, Blender, and Varkon is libraries of little drawings called "components". (An interesting program is the Beta prototype "Fritzing" for designing Arduino breadboards. Fritzing is all about placing components and drawing wires between the components. It has a delightful simple data structure for doing this.)
The whole world of CAD or mechanical drafting programs is wrapped up in incompatible islands of proprietary user drawing data structures. It seems to spring from business based engineers who want to be paid directly for every single use of their engineering knowledge.
Since it is partly free and it does run on Linux (with Wine), I like Google Sketchup. The drawing app is genius, the user data structure is proprietary and the data can be exported only using the $500 professional version of Sketchup. I wish they would publish their user data structure.
It would be both fun and a first class challenge to write conversion utilities to convert files from Sketchup to Blender, from Sketchup to PythonCAD and Qcad. From the CAD programs back and forth to SAGE and Xnec2c. Here is an interesting problem in doing user data structure conversions: When doing the file conversion, you need a way to not throw away data that one program uses and another doesn't. One way is to provide for internal comments within the user application data structure for each drawing application. And figure out how to keep each comment together with some active point within the data structure.