As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though.

Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)

I doubt that Autocad was ever written in Lisp.

Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.

Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.

It's confusing, all right, and I don't think it makes for maintainable code.

Example: http://www.lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html

> I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations.

They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.

Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in.

That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.

That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.

Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets.

"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."

Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.

Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.

Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.

A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.

Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.

BIM software like Revit is pretty clever and would be difficult to build from scratch. AutoCAD is horrible but a lot of the horribleness is difficult to get rid of while providing the same functionality. So, I'm not sure I agree with your take.

They bought Revit and have somehow managed to regress it. Before owning Revit, and therefore only owning a small percentage of the nascent BIM tool marketplace, they drove the creation of IFC classes to ensure interoperability between BIM platforms. Now they practically own BIM, support for this has gone.

Auto desk are a vile company. A serial monopolist that make any of the othe offenders look tame. I'd love to see them go out of business. That said, I hope those that have lost their jobs find new ones soon.

I was commenting on "most CAD software", not just Autodesk products. Autodesk is not a sexy company (monopoly or otherwise) but I really wonder whether DWG/AutoCAD's key market, architectural drafting (as opposed to architectural drawing) is ever going to be a rewarding activity for anyone.

I've got years of diverse experience in the field of architecture and software, and Revit seems like a very clever toy but not a substitute for endless labour over details. Good architects draw every brick (or equivalent), and/or they also work in close experimental collaboration with the people fabricating the building elements. I'm thinking in the first case of Caruso St. John http://www.carusostjohn.com/ drawing every brick and in the second of a practice like Grimshaw http://grimshaw-architects.com/ using lost-wax casting (investment casting) to make components. The trade or craft knowledge involved means there are effective constraints which cannot even be expressed in Revit (individual bricks are not really an option in Revit, and you definitely wouldn't want to design a metal casting using Revit... It's an Autocad job, or better, a job for something more expressive like Maya or Mudbox (or whatever it's called) or whatever tool suits your aesthetic. You can't get to Rodin from Autocad.)

> They did, but once you buy it, it's yours?

Autodesk certainly doesn't think so, at least with respect to people who purchase copies of their software.