Evan on Engineering Software

From Groklaw: 

Imagine if firemen arrived at a fire, and their hoses couldn't fit on the hydrant.

Don't laugh. It happened in 1904, when reinforcements arrived from out-of-state to help fight a huge fire in Baltimore, and the disaster -- the fire destroyed approximately 2,500 buildings and burned for more than 30 hours, while all those out-of-state firemen watched helplessly -- led to standards on firehose couplings. Prior to that, each municipality had its own. I think computers have similarly reached a point where too many people depend on them to let there be competing and incompatible standards. Think Katrina. Yes, people's lives do depend on computers sometimes.

Of course, this made me think about CAD files.  Right now, the de facto standard for 2D CAD is DWG.  But DWG is not DWG is not DWG.   For example, Shaan Hurley recently described a situation with ARX objects where your DWG files could become unreadable, with no help from non-Autodesk software.  Though Autodesk has some patches to help deal with this, the simple reality is that AutoCAD 2007 has broken backwards compatibility in a rather serious way.  I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

People have been used to being able to open up DWG files, no matter where they came from.  That's changing. 

If there were an alternative to DWG, I'd be the first to jump on the bandwagon, and say "let's all standardize on it."  But there are about 7 million CAD users out there who are used to using DWG to store and exchange CAD data -- and though they may be facing some real compatibilty problems in the foreseeable future, few are, at this point, disposed to change they way they work.

Maybe it's going to take the equivalent of the Baltimore fire to convince Autodesk that DWG interoperability is important for more than just their own software.