Evan on Engineering Software

Every day, the Open Design Alliance gets emails from companies that are just getting started.  Here's one I just got, where the writer asks a rather well thought out question:

I'm sure you get emails like this fairly regularly.  We're in the process of spinning off a company... that does 3d simulations, and many of our customers are interested in importing Autocad files...
 
What happens when Autodesk decides to use non-trivial encryption on [DWG] files?  I cannot imagine that it would be difficult to add strong encryption to the file headers, which could not be broken easily in the same way that the current bit-shift stuff was reverse engineered.  Or is there a tacit agreement that autodesk wants their formats to be the standard, but wants to make everyone else's life just a little bit difficult by not making it a true open standard?
 
I would also like to take the opportunity to thank you for providing the community with access to these formats; I cannot tell you how important being able to interact with Autocad is likely to be for us.  You guys are doing really important work.

We've had to find the answer to his question already -- because, by all appearances, it's already happened.   I can't yet say, with complete certainty, that there's no legitimate customer-serving purpose to the encoding that Autodesk has incorporated into the headers of the new DWG 2007 format -- but I can pretty much rule out the normal things, such as improved performance and enhanced reliability. (Update: May 12 -- It appears that at least some of the encoding in the new DWG 2007 file format includes error-correction coding -- which is definitely something that is customer-serving.  We'll know more soon.)

While Autodesk could certainly speak to the reasons they've chosen to obfuscate the format in which their applications store customer data, they've chosen not to.

In any event, no matter what Autodesk may do (or not do), I think it's important to say this: we'll find a solution to the problem.