I'm surprised nobody in the Eurozone has raised similar issues about Adobe.
There is this one:
https://www.allplan.com/us_en/
Not an architect myself, but heard good things.
Autodesk criticised by architects
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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#32I don’t really understand SaaS for such mature products. My work (woodworking) is about making pieces of furniture. Using software is only a part of the process. It is not the actual goal. I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original…
You have chosen the tool which is not actually owned by you and does not have good substitution from another vendor. No wonder you have exposed yourself to rent-seeking and other things you don't want.
It's not a situation that can be solved by individual, I know. But a profession as a collective should group around open tools.
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#33Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal? I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is
Not everybody likes to hear it, but archive.is is an illegal operation. In some countries, posting archive.is links may even be illegal as well (it might be interpreted by a court as "Aiding and Abetting Criminal Copyright Infringement")
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#34There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be. I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X"…
Most of these already exist in their cloud offerings
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#35I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.
It's quite hard to develop software by just throwing money at it. And even harder when the domain is a bit niche and a bit esoteric so your hiring will be even harder. The optimal person would be a game dev with a penchant for math and a MSc in an engineering field. And you would like to have a team of these, please. Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse experience to start with you'…
Autodesk has gone "software as a service". For a long time they sold boxed software. But that market is over. So they went to "software as a service". That can get very expensive for users. That's apparently the real customer complaint.
I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies kept going bust. Silicon Graphics bought Alias and Wavefront and came out with Maya. Then SGI got run over when gamer graphics cards became good enough to make SGI workstations obsolete. (Also, a badly timed sale and leaseback deal with Goldman Sachs for the property that is now the Google campus in Mountain View.) When SGI tanked, Autodesk picked up Maya.
Softimage was also picked up. They had a good 3D animation system, and then they came out with an early pro-grade film and video editing program. Avid, which used to sell overpriced furniture with built-in computers as editing stations, bought Softimage to get control of the editing software. They had no idea what to do with the animation software and sold that to Autodesk.
Then there was Lightscape, which had the first good radiosity renderer, but by itself a renderer wasn't a viable product. So Autodesk bought that.
Autodesk managed to get all those pieces to play well together, and now they're all part of Maya. Autodesk ended up owning the Hollywood-grade animation business.
A side effect of owning the animation business was that the architectural tools had really good rendering. Good enough that you could put all the light fixtures where they would go on the real building, and see how the finished building would look when lit. This was a big win when you needed to sell your design to the customer for the building. That's not so exotic today, but it was ahead of its time 20 years ago.
On the engineering side, getting computational solid geometry to work right is hard. There's free software for that. Try threading a rod and then applying a chamfer on the end. It works in Inventor and Fusion. FreeCAD, not so much. This is an area where the distance between "works for the easy cases" and "just works" is considerable. There's a reason that Autodesk employed a "staff geometer", a geometry theorist. Or play with the 2D constraint system in the Fusion 360 sketch module, where you designate A is tangent to B, C is parallel with D, circle E is tangent to the three circles F, G, and H (that required a new solution to the Problem of Apollonius) and watch it make the drawing consistent.
(Disclaimer: I'm an Autodesk stockholder, but haven't been involved with the company for decades.)
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#36Would be great, if architects invested in free & open source software: https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre https://blenderbim.org/ https://community.osarch.org/
They are so bad, it's not worth learning those tools, or even using them for hobby/home projects.
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#37Interesting that the criticism is levelled at Autodesk 'the company' rather than that it admits what people don't want to say: Autocad is pretty good, and it will take a large and well funded entity to take it on. Using anti-trust tools may be the right tool here but the industry as a whole was quick to adapt to Autocad long before it became a dominant player. Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of devel…
I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features and improvements.
The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#38The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.
It's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care about mechanical CAD is just too small f…
I guess people who can do the math would like to get paid properly for their efforts.
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#39The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.
Fusion 360 isn’t a Solidworks competitor, not even close that would be Autodesk Inventor. Yes Fusion 360 is very easy to use but it is because it’s basically sketchup with basic CAM, simulation and parametric modeling baked in.
I believe Fusion 360 is full AutoCAD engine with locked down GUI?
Re: Autodesk criticised by architects
#40It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them. Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Rhino is genuinely fun to use. Best UX of by far of any program I've ever had the pleasure of using.
Blender is frustrating as heck to use in comparison.