Gentle persons: Holy cow! I count eighteen mail digests between my message of just two days ago and now. We're really cooking with gas here.
I meant no disrespect to Weber Systems by not mentioning Synergy. It has tons of features both on the CAD side and the CAM side and now even includes the Parasolid geometry kernel which according to some puts it on the side of the angels (unless, of course, you're backing the competing ACIS). If you'll look back through EMC-users messages to June, you'll see I figured out how to install and run the Synergy version of the time on Ubuntu 8.04 despite the libqt issue. It's just that I thought we were discussing *Free* 3D CADs. Please tell me if I'm misunderstanding the Weber Systems message that the free evaluation period expires in 30 days. I deleted the whole install after playing with it on and off for several weeks and drove on. Now I get the impression from Dave Wengall's recent comment that the CAD portion remains free??? [I wish, by the way, that Weber Systems would join the 21st century and put their pricing structure on their website. I understand what their website says about this, but, frankly, I'm not interested in calling a sales engineer just to find out if there's any point in having the conversation.] Regarding DWG (and DXF), Autodesk has been very coy for 20 years now about the technical details and with every new release of AutoCAD both DWG and DXF change, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, to accommodate the new features. It got to the point that a bunch of folks formed what is now called the Open Design Alliance to maintain a stable, accessible specification called...wait for it...OpenDWG (see http://www.opendwg.org). As a result, creating DWG readers/writers has become a less visible issue but you can still crash and burn if you're working on the bleeding edge of Autodesk products. I'm hopelessly prejudiced, having spent much of my professional life developing and promulgating open standards for information exchange, but I think if a company's product data are important enough to spend a gazillion bucks on software to create it, then it's too important to let the software hold the data hostage through the use of unpublished, proprietary data exchange formats. It's the information that should be the strategic asset of manufacturing companies, not the software they had to buy to manipulate it. Next time I promise to talk about something completely different :-) Cheers, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
