Issue #95: 17 February, 1998

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    • Visio Forms OpenDWG Alliance

    As predicted in upFront.eZine #94, an open DWG foundation was announced last Tuesday. In a stunning announcement, Visio has made the recently-acquired MarComp AutoDirect2 DWG read/write API library freely available -- that's right: free for non-commercial and in-house use. Commercial licenses are US$5,000. The API has been renamed The OpenDWG Toolkit and can be downloaded now from http://www.opendwg.org

    The purpose of the Alliance is to collect the DWG translation experience of dozens of software vendors. In a conference call to CAD industry analysts, Visio vp Ted Johnson described the OpenDWG Alliance as "committed to publicly sharing the knowledge its members possess about the DWG format in order to provide millions of CAD users with better technology and better access to their own data."

    These are the 15 CAD vendors who ponied up US$25,000 apiece to become Founding Members, with a seat on the board of directors:

    However, not all founding members currently have DWG translation in their product. PTC said their first implementation would have to wait until Pro/Engineer Release 20. The most significant company missing from the list is Bentley Systems, a MarComp licensee. Their reaction is noted below.

    Autodesk Says, "No!"

    The OpenDWG Alliance has a standing invitation to Autodesk to join. However, in an exclusive interview with upFront.eZine, Autodesk's emphatic reply is, "No!" Amar Hanspal, director of AutoCAD product marketing, says Autodesk sees no benefit in joining and will not join the OpenDWG Alliance; Autodesk does not see OpenDWG as a threat.

    During the interview, Autodesk turned the tables on Visio. Said CTO Carl Bass, By forming this alliance, Visio is admitting that IntelliCAD is not 100% compatible with AutoCAD. OpenDWG is an admission by Visio that they need help from 13 other companies in decoding DWG.

    We agree with Autodesk's assertion that it is not the DWG data that other CAD vendors have problems with. Rather, the problem lies in trying to map unique-to-AutoCAD objects (such as the splined polyline and unlimited layers) to similar-but-different objects in the destination CAD software. Said Autodesk, "It's not the data; it's what you do with the data."

    In what is perhaps most damning statement against OpenDWG, Autodesk wonders why it should open up DWG when companies like Visio and PTC have not done that with their VSD and Pro/E file formats. Autodesk calls DWG "our intellectual property." It sees DWG as 'merely' (our term) a compressed, secure, fast-loading variant of DXF. Autodesk pr person Barbara Brown provided this list of ten open data exchange standards Autodesk already supports:

    The overriding theme of the interview was: The DWG format is already open -- via DXF. Said Mr Bass, "Our customers own their data -- via DXF." To answer those detractors who insist DXF is missing objects found in DWG, Mr Bass provided these responses:

    + OLE is not present in DWG nor DXF.
    + ACIS data is encrypted in DXF but the encryption is easily decoded. In any case, ACIS data is freely available via SAT export/import.
    + Application-generated objects are not necessarily stored in DWG or DXF. It is up to the ARx application to generate and work with app-specific data.

    We got the impression Autodesk will continue to modify DWG in upcoming releases of AutoCAD, such as "R14+1", Autodesk's internal term for The Next Release of AutoCAD. Mr Bass said that after ballooning in size with Release 13, DWG will get smaller and that authentication will be added.

    Bentley Says, It's the Wrong Approach!

    We asked Bentley Systems about their reaction to the OpenDWG Alliance. In an telephone interview, Greg Bentley emphasized, "The MarComp libraries are the least of what is required for living in a world of multiple file standards. OpenDWG does not approach the problem of dealing with data sets." This would have been a great solution in the early 90s, says Mr Bentley, but CAD data is moving beyond static data files.

    Like Autodesk, Bentley is saying "No" to participating; however, they would see merit in joining if Autodesk joined. Until then, Bentley Systems see OpenDWG as "a claim at the marketing level only" and perhaps as an attempt by Visio to create momentum for itself in the low price levels (under $500) of CAD. Bentley doesn't operate in that region.

     Like Autodesk, Bentley sees the future in application- generated data. In MicroStation's case, this will come from Java applets (ARx in AutoCAD's case). [With so much in common with Autodesk, perhaps the two companies should form the "AOA," the Anti-OpenDWG Alliance! -- Ed.]

    Summed up Bentley vp Yoav Etiel <Yoav.Etiel@bentley.com>: "As the leading developer of software for large-scale engineering projects, Bentley relies -- as it has always been relying -- on its own developers rather than development by a committee, to deliver translation to/from the Autodesk proprietary drawing formats.
     "The real issues for the approaching millennium is that data will rarely exist without accompanying programs. With Java we are now working on some breakthrough multi-platform interoperability, including what can be done BEYOND translators, such as our  announced plans to develop a 'DWG mode' for MicroStation/J."

    Reaction to OpenDWG

    "Wow! So what do you think about all this?" asks an upFront.eZine reader. We consider the announcement of OpenDWG as the most important CAD event of 1998. But will the OpenDWG Alliance work? There is one prior example of opening up a CAD data format, whose experience we can draw on. Several years ago, Intergraph placed its IGDS file format in the public domain. Despite that, IGDS failed to become ubiquitous; Intergraph no longer uses IGDS for its new CAD products. Bentley Systems used IGDS as the basis for MicroStation's DGN file (in fact, MicroStation v1.0 was simply an IGDS file viewer) but Bentley has been adding undocumented, proprietary extensions.

    Despite the fact that Autodesk and Bentley Systems dismiss the importance of the DWG file, there is much valuable data stored in the two billion drawing files -- as estimated by Autodesk. Take something as "trivial" as cataloging all blocks (symbols) in all drawings stored on your network. With the OpenDWG Toolkit, it will be easier for a third- party developer to implement such an application -- think of the horror of having to convert all drawings to DXF, first!

    Market News

    PTC is set for a 2-for-1 stock split.
    Visio has completed its acquisition of the technology and assets of InfoModelers, Inc.

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