ODA Fights Back

Owen Wengerd has posted the ODA's response to Autodesk's complaint. The ODA wants some interesting things to happen. For those who do not have the time and patience to read through 26 pages of legal jargon, here is what ODA wants:

(1) Autodesk should stop false advertisement and promotion of its products.
(2) Autodesk should compensate ODA for current and future losses. Amount not specified.
(3) The Court should fine Autodesk. Amount not specified but should be "sufficient to deter Autodesk from similar conduct in the future". I wonder how much that might be.
(4) Autodesk should pay treble damages, attorney fees, interest, etc. (the usual stuff)
(5) Autodesk should tell everyone ("corrective advertising") about its "unlawful conduct" and any judgement passed against it. This sounds interesting.
(6) Autodesk should remove or modify all statements, popup boxes, warning messages related to "Non Autodesk DWG". However, ODA is kind enough to allow Autodesk to show a neutral statement that the file was created by a non-Autodesk product.

Tall order.

Nibbling at the AutoCAD Pie

AutoCAD is the most widely used CAD software, which makes it's customers the number one target for any new CAD software vendor. In recent years there have been a whole new range of low cost CAD systems and they have all tried to nibble at AutoCAD's pie. The tactics used by these vendors to achieve this have been as different as the CAD systems they make. I wish to share my views on the three low cost CAD systems: Alibre Design, IntelliCAD and Rhinoceros.

Alibre Design
Alibre is all set to shake things up in the CAD software industry. Their CEO, Greg Milliken, has a blog called "Alibre CEO Blog". He wrote an article "Thank You Sir May I Have Another" which leads me to believe that he is guy who speaks him mind. I am not sure whether his blog is a reflection of his personal views or whether describes Alibre's company policy towards their competitors. Here is part of what he said in the article:

"If you are an Autodesk customer and you accept this behavior [product retirement] then you need to realize you are a part of the problem. Your dollars are reinforcing this, both by rewarding them for their disrespect of you, and also by not rewarding those who are truly working to move the industry forward, earning your business through respect and adding value."

I do not disagree with the contents of the article. Just like Greg, I am against product retirement and believe it is a shameful way of forcing customers to upgrade. However, I am not sure that pointing an accusing finger at prospective customers is a nice way of wooing them.

I believe that Alibre Design is a great piece of software - very powerful and wonderfully priced. I intend to develop add-ins for Alibre Design in the near future.


IntelliCAD
Unlike Alibre, the IntelliCAD software vendors do not have the liberty of cursing AutoCAD, since their software is essentially an AutoCAD clone and they market it as such. Their entire marketing strategy revolves around the phrase "Low Cost AutoCAD Alternative". Their strategy is to woo AutoCAD customers (who are presumably fed up with expensive upgrades or high subscription costs) by telling them that there is an alternative which works just as well. Pretty simple and straightforward.


Rhinoceros
McNeel, the developers of Rhinoceros, are pretty smart people. They could have easily marketed their software as an AutoCAD replacement, because the GUI and a lot of other things closely resemble AutoCAD. They could have also asked prospective customers to "switch over", citing low cost as a good enough reason to do so. But instead they began marketing Rhino as a "companion" to other CAD systems, thereby slowing getting into the workflow of prospective customers. They claim that Rhino can be very handy along side your existing CAD system.

The Rhino trial is designed to supplement this marketing strategy. Most software vendors have a time-limited trial period, usually 30 days. The Rhino trial has a limit of 25 saves. After that it will still work, just that it will not save. So even after the trial expires the prospect can still use Rhino as a free viewer (since Rhino is able to import a large number of file formats) as well as a free analysis and measurement tool. The idea is to get the prospect to make Rhino a part of his workflow. Instead of having him uninstall a trial that will no longer run, they want him to keep using it in some way or the other, in the hope that one day he will go ahead and purchase a license. Smart.

I have been writing plug-ins for Rhino since version 2.0. It is an awesome piece of software with an extremely powerful and easy to use API. I know many AutoCAD customers who have purchased Rhino licenses to work along side AutoCAD. I know this because I have written customized plug-ins for their Rhino installations to do things that AutoCAD could not do or I could not customize AutoCAD to do.

AutoCAD 2007 for $130 only!!

This morning as I was sifting through my usual share of spam, one particular email caught my attention. I followed the link in the email and reached a "company" offering AutoCAD 2007 for $130 ($129.95 to be precise). Nothing new. What amused me was what they said about themselves on their about page.


Who Are We?
[CompanyName] is a rapidly growing company providing high quality software. You've come to the right place if you need professionally implemented programming solutions for your usage. Thousands of satisfied customers have already benefited from our products and solutions. Hundreds are joining this community every day.

Our Mission
To deliver superior software products and services that empower our partners and customers to dramatically improve their development, deployment, integration and management of quality applications worldwide.

Our Team
We employ only the best professionals. Our development team has collected great analysts and programmers each having degrees in areas of responsibility as well as 3 to 10 years of professional experience. We are happy to embody our inventive ideas into optimal solutions for our customers using the most relevant information technologies.

Why choose [CompanyName]?
Everything is simple here:
1. We provide high quality solutions
2. We do the job on time
3. We fit within your budget


To add insult to injury the email came from cbowers (at) jesuschristpage (dot) com. The pirates couldn't have hijacked a better domain for their email bombardment compaign. I visited jesuschristpage.com. As I read these words from the home page the irony of it all came to light and I found myself smiling.

Jesus Christ Loves Us... Although He never committed a sin, He did associate with sinners while He was here in the flesh. Today Jesus is still reaching out to imperfect people, because He loves us too much to leave us hopeless.

Compliments of the season to one and all.

Trap Indeed

Owen Wengerd's blog on the Autodesk-ODA law suit has listed the transcript of the November 22 TRO hearing. Truly worth reading. A few things caught my attention. Earlier, I had wondered whether the ODA had walked into a trap. As can be seen from the ODA lawyer's statements below, it appears that Autodesk did indeed lay a trap for the ODA. Here are bits of what the ODA lawyer said in the court. I have edited them slightly for clarity.

The only way to disable this popup is to imitate the code so that instead of a popup coming up the message about it being a TrustedDWG product comes up. There is simply no other way that our [ODA] programmers have been able to figure out to fix it.

The difficulty is a lock-out string. What they [Autodesk] have done is encoded into their software this message that cannot be removed unless you pretend to be like it. That is why we have the problem that we have.

What we deliberately did is disabled the popup in the only way that our programmers could figure out how to do it.

Another thing caught my attention. The ODA lawyer kept insisting that Autodesk did not show any proof of tests that it had supposedly carried out showing that the ODA libraries sometimes created corrupted DWG files.

So they [Autodesk] have undertaken it [the tests]. That creates the burden of proof on them. And if they had it you can be sure that they would have produced it.

That whole issue of the testing, the cases say the burden is on them to show that they have got empirical support. I would envision that they would present some argument, some studies or something to support their underlying claims. We can respond to them.

Earlier in another article "ODA shoots itself in the foot", I listed ODA's release notes which clearly documented that the ODA libraries did sometimes create corrupted DWG files. I always wondered why the Autodesk lawyers didn't use this evidence. Looks like they were not aware of it after all.

Good News, Bad News

Good News: Autodesk has informed me that my request to remove the polyface mesh limitation has been entered into the AutoCAD wish list.

Bad News: Since this would mean changing the DWG file format, I suspect that this change may come about only in AutoCAD 2010, assuming that Autodesk will continue with its three-year DWG compatibility cycle.

The long and short of AutoCAD's PolyFace Mesh

AutoCAD has a polyface mesh entity (PFACE comand) which is capable of describing a mesh object, something that other CAD systems usually call "polygon mesh". Basically a collection of triangle and/or quad faces connected to each other by common vertices. Meshes are used in a variety of applications such as terrain modelling, rapid prototyping, reverse engineering, finite element analysis, etc.

There is a little dark secret about AutoCAD's polyface mesh which needs to be told. The polyface mesh entity cannot have more than 32,767 vertices. Why? Because the polyface mesh data structure is designed that way. Why? I don't know. However, I do know that there are other CAD systems out there with far less features and much less expensive that do not have this limitation.

Let me explain. This may get a bit technical. In programming an integer can be stored as a char (1 byte), short (2 bytes), int (4 bytes) and long (8 bytes). I have left the "unsigned" types out of this to keep it simple. A short can store a maximum value of 32,767, whereas an int and long can store a maximum value of 2,147,483,647.

The data structure of a polyface mesh is stored as a list of vertices (x,y,z coordinates) followed by a list of faces, wherein each face is defined by the vertices which create that face. For example, a triangular face maybe defined by vertices 304, 306 and 312. Similarly a quad face may be defined by vertices 424, 434, 302 and 211. There is nothing wrong with this method of storing mesh information, In fact, this is the most commonly used method. The problem is that the polyface mesh data structure stores vertex numbers as shorts, not ints or longs, thereby limiting it to have not more than 32,767 vertices.

So what? You may ask. Well, this may have made sense in the good old days when disk space was a luxury. To save 2 or 4 bytes per face they may have said, "What the hell? Who needs large meshes anyways? Lets store vertex numbers as shorts". Not any more. Nowadays it is not uncommon to have meshes containing a million vertices. A decent dental scan will easily cross that number. Reverse engineering involves millions of points which need to be later meshed. Terrain modeling requires meshes equally large.

I came across this issue years ago when I was writing a STL (Stereolithography) file import plug-in for AutoCAD. At that time I didn't notice this limitation and wrote the plug-in to recreate the mesh in the STL file as a polyface mesh in AutoCAD. It worked for small meshes but began acting weird for large meshes. My plug-in reported that it had successfully created a polyface mesh but I could not find it anywhere in the drawing (although I could delete it using the ERASE command). Surprisingly, AutoCAD did not report any error or warning. That was AutoCAD 2000. Over the years, this limitation has carried itself through the newer versions of AutoCAD, even the latest version - 2007. I have done my tests on AutoCAD Spago Beta 2 (the future AutoCAD 2008), but I dont think I am allowed to say anything on that yet.

The irony of all this is that over the years Autodesk has revised the DWG file format a number of times, more recently to make it more difficult for people like ODA to reverse engineer it. I only wish they had changed the short to a long and added real value to it. There are supposedly billions of DWG files out there. Too bad not a single one can store a mesh with more than 32,767 vertices.