Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 18:34:39 +0100 From: Pascal Pype <pascal.pype@skynet.be> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: CAD software and BSD (free BSD , open BSD or netBSD , etc. ) Message-ID: <3A2FCA2F.7060201@skynet.be>
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Hello , This remark must be placed within the context of an announcement of Parametric Technologies Corporation to port their "Pro Engineer" to Linux and the comments posted by several people at Slashdot. This announcement has been posted by chrisd on Monday June 10, @06:21PM from the catia-we're-coming-for-you dept. I choose Autodesk as an example because of the ubiquitious reputation of their product. As we all know Autodesks product releases 10,11,12 and early R13 were all based upon several unix flavors. And all of a sudden from release R14 on , only the windows platform prevailed as the driving OS behind their CAD software. The reason for this is quite obvious : the hardware is much cheaper for a PC compared to whatever workstation. I suppose that the switch over from unix to windows happened at a big scale within the early 90s. I suppose then Linux was not matured enough to be a reasonable alternative for MS Windows. Sure MAC OS X didn't exist back then. But what about free BSD at that time ? Is it so that your organization exists for two decades , if not longer ? So I suppose free BSD (or some other BSD branch) was a reasonable alternative to MS indeed. IHMO a port of autocad from a UNIX flavored workstation towards let's say a free BSD based INTEL box is far more easy to accomplish than a port from that workstation towards the same INTEL box running some windows version. To me it seems far more logical to choose some BSD based version as OS for the migration of expensive hardware to cheaper hardware then the choice of windows as OS because those days the Autodesk code base was UNIX centric. Has your organization ever been contacted by Autodesk before or even while MS gained total control ? I know that much people of the free BSD team present their services towards the organization in the form of a part time job. So there cannot be enough resources from the free BSD team available to do full time professional 3D based development. But at Autodesk there must have been much software engineers that had a firmly in depth unix knowledge. Could a cooperation of those Autocad people with the free BSD team not have been possible to do the port ? What actually happened is that the code of Autodesk has now become tightly tangled with MS centric mechanisms such as OLE automation , VBA , MFC and maybe Direct 3D ... Greetings , Pype Pascal. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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