Perfect Timing

This morning, while I was pulling at my hair trying to debug one of my programs, an email popped up in my inbox. It contained a simple poem...

If I was a painter......
You would be my painting,

If I was an author.....
You would be my story,

If I was a poet.....
You would be my poem,

UNFORTUNATELY
I'm a Programmer...
And you are my bug.

Talk about perfect timing.

Inventor LT Woes

Yesterday, someone on the Autodesk Inventor Discussion Group asked what I believe is a profound question, although I doubt he realized that.

"Autodesk, will there be a chance to download Inventor LT in Asian region soon?"

Down the discussion, one obviously pissed off guy blew his fuse. "If they don't want to let me have their software then I don't want to have it. Take it away, forget I ever asked for it, and that they sent me an e-mail saying I would get it."

Sam Antos, the Product Manager of Inventor, calmly send his standard reply. "We are still limiting availability to US and Canada to ensure the best possible experience for customers who do have access. We are working on expanding to more countries in the future but I cannot provide an ETA. Thank you for your patience."

I wonder how long are they going to keep this up.

Something Isn't Right

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed and conclusions drawn in this article are most probably completely insane. I am not in possession of even a shred of evidence to prove anything you are about to read. To avoid an almost inevitable waste of your time, I humbly request you to read this article in your free time.

Something has been bothering me over the weekend, since I wrote my last article regarding Inventor LT. I am almost convinced that the "feedback" story that has been dished out by Autodesk to would-be Inventor LT users outside the US and Canada is a load of neatly packaged crap. Something isn't right. There is certainly more to this.

Shaan Hurley of Autodesk has been kind enough to leave a comment stating that lawyers and laws were the reason that Inventor LT was restricted to the US and Canada only. While I do not deny that legalities may be a reason, I highly doubt that the law and/or lawyers could be so restrictive, that too for a software which is free. I would like to be enlightened further on this.

Now would be a good time to read the disclaimer above once again.... Ok, you asked for it.

Since I am in India, I haven't seen Inventor LT yet, but a look at Inventor 2008's about box tells me that a lot of technology has been licensed by Autodesk from a variety of sources to give Inventor all its functionality. And from the little I know about Software License and Royalty Agreements (I have read only a few), there is a something known as a "Miminum Royalty per Seat", which is a minimum amount of royalty that has to be paid irrespective of the cost of the product. This means that if I license a technology, embed it into my software and distribute it for free, I still would have to pay a royalty. So common sense tells me that Autodesk is actually paying money for each free seat of Inventor LT that is being installed in the US and Canada.

One can argue that Autodesk may have given the Minimum Royalty per Seat requirement the slip by treating Inventor LT to be a 365 day trial for a product that would be priced at $999 after a year. Indeed, royalty agreements do allow the licensee to distribute trial software without paying any royalty. But the maximum period of trial in all the royalty agreements that I have come across is 90 days. Who knows, Autodesk may have got away with 365. I find this extremely unlikely since among the list of licensors you can find Spatial (which shares a common parent with SolidWorks) and UGS, both of whom are not about to give Autodesk a free hand and let Inventor eat into their market share.

If the above is indeed true then Autodesk has a very good reason to restrict the download of Inventor LT to only those who are most likely to move to Inventor or at least pay $999 for Inventor LT after a year of free use. This logic takes Asia, Africa and South America off the table. Probably Europe will be give access to download Inventor LT next.

Surely you cannot expect Autodesk to tell people outside the US and Europe,"Sorry, we feel that you will eventually use pirated Inventor. So we see no point in shelling out money so that you can use Inventor LT for free." They are a decent bunch of people who would prefer to say, "Current demand for the Inventor LT technology preview has far surpassed our initial estimates. In order to provide our participants with the best experience, we have decided to limit availability to participants in the US and Canada at this time."

Something tells me that I am now going to be crucified. Thank God for disclaimers.

Selling Something Which Is Free

With Autodesk offering their free Inventor LT only in the US and Canada, some enterprising people have now started selling Inventor LT for $199.

I am not quite sure why Inventor is restricted to US and Canada in the first place. Scott Sheppard tried to explain to a reader who reminded him that the world was not limited to USA and Canada.

Scott replied, "Yes the world is not limited to the US and Canada. Due to overwhelmingly high initial customer demand for the Autodesk Inventor LT Technology Preview, we are currently focusing on the high volume of customer feedback we have received so far and have decided to make the Autodesk Inventor LT Technology Preview available for download only in the United States and Canada at this time. A diversity of feedback from around the world is important to us, and we will extend availability to more countries in the future."

I wonder who came up with that excuse. As a software vendor I would love all the feedback I can get and from wherever I can get it. A customer's feedback is not a large box that I need to make place for in my office, as they are making it seem to be. It is just a bunch of bytes.

Autodesk controls your ability to download based on your IP address. So they already which country you belong to. If they want to "focus" on the feedback from the US, then look only at the feedback from the US. It's that simple.

Software vendors, me including, do not act on each and every feedback we receive. But all feedback is accepted and added to a heap, which gets sorted by priority and then acted upon. But not allowing someone to use software for the fear of not being able to do justice to his feedback is stretching it a bit too far.

CollegeFundware

I have heard of Freeware, Shareware, Trialware and other types of ware. Today I came across something called "CollegeFundware".

This guy has calculated how much he will have to spend for his kids' college education (they are toddlers now) and has arrived at a figure of $300,000 for each kid (he has two of them). He hopes to accumulate the required funds in a unique way. He writes software and distributes it as CollegeFundware, the terms of which are pretty simple.

You may use the software for a resonable period of time for evaluation purposes. But if you like the software or if you want to keep using it after you have evaluated it, you are required to license the software by donating some amount to a college fund. Feel free to donate as much as you like, and please keep in mind that no one is "getting rich" off your donations.

Certainly better than all the End User License Agreements I have seen, even mine.

Half A Century

With the release of five new plug-ins for Rhino, SYCODE has made a record of sorts. We have more than 50 products, 52 to be precise. Yes, I know most of them are small plug-ins. But keeping all of them updated and in working condition is turning out to be quite a task.

With almost all the CAD vendors adopting a yearly release cycle, we need to test each of these products and adjust them so that they work with the latest version and also the earlier versions. This problem gets compounded by regular releases of service packs and patches by the CAD vendors. We find ourselves doing more testing than development. Looks like the time has come to outsource the testing to one of those emerging economies like India and China.

Hey wait a minute! We ARE in India.

Yes, Orkut Allows Software Piracy

Two weeks ago I wondered whether Orkut was allowing software piracy. I now have an answer. Yes, it is. The Orkut community I mentioned earlier now has 6,330 members (it grew by 710 in these two weeks). I reported this community to Orkut, but they have not taken any action and I doubt they ever will.

So much for a Google company. By the way, did I mention that you can also get a crack for Google SketchUp Pro on Orkut?

Who Will Be Bought First - Rhino or MoI?

There has always been talk of how McNeel will be bought by one of the larger companies. I have been hearing this since Rhino 2.0. Some of you may have heard this earlier. Either Bob McNeel and his Associates would prefer to die rather than selling their company or they have not yet been made a good enough offer. I hope it is the former. I personally like the McNeel business model and have praised it more than once on this blog.

However, in recent times, with an increase focus on non-parametric modeling, thanks to SpaceClaim and the like, things are getting more interesting in this sphere. This brings me to Moment Of Inspiration, the Rhino-like CAD software developed by Michael Gibson, a former McNeel employee.

For those who don't know, Michael was the brain behind Rhino. He wrote all the code for Rhino (other than the geometry kernel code) for two years while other McNeel developers were working on a project called "AccuModel", a plug-in for AutoCAD that enabled NURBS modeling using the Applied Geometry kernel inside AutoCAD. Michael wrote all the user interface code, the command structure, object/point pickers, toolbar buttons, icon editor, graphics display, viewports, color picker, object snaps and so on. He did all this in C (a programming language), which was later ported to C++. After two years Rhino was in better shape that AccuModel. So McNeel decided to shaft AccuModel and moved all the developers to improve Rhino. From then on Rhino development went into overdrive.

My point is that under the hood Rhino and MoI have a lot in common. Sure they do not look the same. Michael is marketing it as a CAD system for tablet PCs. I am not buying into that. I believe he did not want MoI to be given the "clone" tag, something which IntelliCAD is still trying to shed.

As the thrust towards non-parametric modeling gathers momentum, the big companies with strict parametric modeling systems will want to offer their customers a non-parametric solution as well. Probably as a freebie with their parametric system, just like how SolidWorks is offering IntelliCAD free with a SolidWorks license, to make it easier for AutoCAD users to move to SolidWorks. I do not expect SolidWorks to suddenly start non-parametric modeling, no matter how "smart" it gets. But it is conceivable that SolidWorks could bundle a non-parametric system, which exchanges design data seamlessly with SolidWorks, as well as sell it separately. The same goes for other big vendors.

As always, when faced with a "make or buy" decision the easier and faster way out is to buy. So if the big companies cannot buy out McNeel, they are going to try to lay their hands on Triple Squid Software Design, Michael's one-man company (if they haven't already). Maybe they are just waiting for him to finish MoI (it's still in open beta). I am sure Michael could retrofit MoI with a menu and command prompt at short notice.

I am not trying to equate Rhino with MoI here. MoI is merely a subset of Rhino, although it has a far better graphics display. MoI can display gorgeous anti-aliased curves even on low end video cards. As a plug-in developer, to me the greatest drawback of MoI is that it does not yet support plug-ins. I have taken up with issue with Michael, but he has other things on his mind. After all how much can one man do alone, even if his name is Michael Gibson.

When upFront.eZine asked Bob McNeel about MoI, he spoke about how keeping 150,000 Rhino users happy wasn't as fun as starting something new. He ended by saying, "I guess that is why many startups sell out before they have been around more than a few years". So does Bob want to go back to having fun?

Ouch! That Hurt

Matt Lombard, the author of the SolidWorks Bible, today laments on the poor reviews on his book at Amazon.com. I feel for the guy. As a software developer I am often dished out the same treatment. People review my software and sometimes post ridiculous reviews and comments. Like Matt, I do not claim that my software is divine and free of shortcomings. However, I would welcome well informed constructive criticizm.

Some comments can be short and sweet like "Don't buy. Does not work.", or just "Horrible". Thats it. No explanation as to what the problem was.

I remember an instance wherein some wise crack "tried" to use my HPGL plot file (.plt) import plug-in for AutoCAD. As luck would have it, the plt files he had were not HPGL plot files at all. They were some other plot files with a .plt extension. My software is designed to give a warning in such cases, which it did. This guy then contacted me and I explained that the problem was his plt files and not the software. Apparently he was so unhappy with my response that he went ahead and gave a horrible review at the portal where he downloaded my software from. And, by the way, he didn't even buy the software to be entitled to a review.

However, I would also like to say that there are some good souls out there who sincerely want to help others make an informed decision, while at the same time, send a message to the author to improve his product.

But I guess, you have to take in your stride. Who said life was fair?