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Microsoft Integrates Autodesk's 3D Printing Platform Spark Into Windows 10

Posted by timothy on from the try-explaining-that-to-grandma dept.

An anonymous reader writes: At Microsoft's Build 2015 developer conference today, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft vice president of developer and platform evangelism, announced new 3D printing features in Windows 10. More specifically, Autodesk Spark is being integrated into Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system. Spark is a platform for building 3D printing software, hardware, materials, and services. Adding it to Windows 10 is a big win for Autodesk.

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Might as well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Autodesk has tied themselves so tightly to Microsoft that they might as well just become another system utility.

  2. Re:Standardized DRM? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you look at the Spark workflow (http://spark.autodesk.com/about) prominent on the list of features is "copyright protection". How exactly this system goes about deciding what you are and are not allowed to print could be quite significant, especially if Microsoft's market share makes it the de facto standard.

    Bleh, after looking into this a bit I think it's even worse than that.

    Autodesk is calling this an "open platform", but it's most certainly not "open" in the same way we'd usually talk about more permissive "open source" licenses, such as BSD or Apache. So, it's more of a "free as in beer" sort of open, as far as I can tell. They've got a bunch of cloud-related features that (I think) are intended to facilitate transfer of models from design to manufacturing regions, but it looks like it's all very tightly under Autodesk's control, and they're very clear that they're not giving anyone else any control or licensing rights to the code or platform.

    Check out the Spark Terms of Service. Open, my ass. How do you get "open" out of that? They're simply defining open as "anyone can use it if they sign up with us", which is about as "open" as Facebook. I was initially hopeful that this might be a good thing for the 3D printing industry, but all it would do is cede a massive amount of control over the 3D printing process to Autodesk, and I can't see how that's a good thing at all.

    Meh. Now I'm sort of hoping this dies.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.