When Autodesk bought Softimage, I said it was the end of XSI.
Nobody wanted to believe me at that time, peoples were reassured with
wonderfull statements saying on the contrary "with the dev and financial
power of Autodesk" glorious days are ahead..
Well.. I hope now these peoples realize XSI *is* indead dead.
Autodesk bought Softimage for technologies and patents to be reused in
other products, nothing more.
I think it's now time for the 3d industry to boycott Autodesk. But who
has really the balls to do that ?
Lately, we saw more and more open source libraries developped and
released by major companies. I think it's a sign.
There is a non-said/secret wish more and more obvious for the rise of an
alternative solution, an open source and free solution, a weapon against
beeing held hostage by companies who don't give a f..k about their
clients, only their wallet.
There are some very interresting initiatives, openexr, ptex, opensubdiv,
the applessed renderer, the fabric engine, etc.. among a lot of others.
I believe in this approach: companies, freelancers, working on 'blocks'
of features that could be assembled together to produce the weapon in
question.
It's a non-sense now to start a company to create a new 'ultimate' 3d
software. What makes sense is if each company, individual, creates a
'block' of something, depending on their level of expertise. Then those
blocks can be assembled together either by a community, a company, an
individual. The result would suits each one of them.
And these weapons must be open source and free.
These would be the only weapon powerfull enough against softwares and
jobs killer companies like Autodesk.
So rather than to complain against Autodesk, who has actualy the guts to
do something about it ?
- Stop using Autodesk products ? (I did)
- Work on alternative solutions ? (I do)
- Contribute to existing projects ? (I'm trying)
- Create your on 'block' ? (I'm trying)
No ? Then stop complaining, you have no power to change the situation
with words only. Companies like Autodesk do not care about your words.
At all.
Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | raa.tel | radfac founder/ceo
