progeCAD support, tips and troubleshooting forum. progeCAD works very similar to some versions of AutoCAD. Moderated.

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Do you believe Autodesk really wants open CAD file compatibility?

Yes
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No
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100%
What is this?
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#146 by caddit
Thu Jul 17, 2008 3:43 am
progeCAD is one product that uses "DWGdirect" from the Open Design Alliance(ODA) to efficiently read write convert and edit DWG files. For those of you not following the news about the expensive litigation Autodesk has been attacking the ODA with continually, here is an update for our point of view:
Autodesk Escalates War on "Open DWG" Technology

One very interesting aspect revealed is that the company Bentley (Microstation) now celebrating "Interoperability" with Autodesk is actually the same company that just a year before released a study accusing Autodesk of deliberately contributing $1billion to the $11+billion wasted annually (according to NIST) just in the AEC industry due to poor file compatibility between systems.

Since little has changed about Autodesk business practices, could this new alliance with Bentley be just another ploy to eventually force everyone back to Autodesk?
#149 by Kapr
Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:34 am
I think, that OpenDWG is the first step.
As an analogy to Microsoft Office "standard" documents related to OpenDocument format , there must be established new really Open CAD Format. DXF failed in this role for many reasons. Open format with its own extension and enhancements.It promises very much for market:
New format could be from origin designed to fully support foreign languages with Unicode encoding. Support for different national standards. Fully documented extensible format alowing acces for third party firms for reasonable cost. It could be multiplatform oriented. Without ballast of compatibilty with previous versions. Exactly defined and unambigouesly interpreted. Easily translated to older formats (understand DWG :) ).
Monopols must realise, that closed formats and practices leading to extortion are ineligible and decreasing value of their product.
#1319 by caddit
Tue Oct 26, 2010 1:08 pm
I found this amusing enough to share.

They say imitation is the best compliment. That can obviously be said about progeCAD imitating many aspects of AutoCAD, which is no secret with the US federal trade commission which passed a law to, in fact, protect IntelliCAD.

Believe it or not, it seems Autodesk Asia-Pacific has begun returning the compliment to CADDIT by bidding substantially for adwords targeting the IntelliCAD product keyword:

Image

This image was taken tonight. Autodesk maybe feels IntelliCAD can now no longer afford to be ignored..

#2284 by Conrad
Tue Nov 03, 2015 6:13 am
Didn't have interoperability issues with pen and paper: communication problems may be in terms of symbolic representation.

Data files need to be open format, and software can read as much or as little as they need from such files. One problem with BIM is that too much focus on selling tools to work with what is otherwise a proprietary data model, than having a true universal and central data model.

Some users do not need the 3D graphical model and do not need to ever view it: but they may need the underlying data and access to and need to change.

A central data repository from which can extract and modify the data of relevance, using what ever tools find most useful: which could be a simple command line xml or sql reader. Now a command line tool for working with dwg file without a graphical editor I believe would be a useful tool.