Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
Caesar’s Funeral Speech by Marc Antony,
from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

So I had to say something regarding Autodesk’s recent lawsuit against the Open Design Alliance alleging trademark infringement and alleging both monetary damages and loss of reputation. To draw again from the Bard, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

For those not familiar, this is all about Autodesk introducing “TrustedDWG™” in AutoCAD 2007, and ODA’s response to it. TrustedDWG is basically a new initiative whereby AutoCAD 2007 looks for an encrypted digital signature written into DWG files by AutoCAD, and if it doesn’t find it AutoCAD pops up an onerous warning dialog that you are in danger of all sorts of potentially terrible consequences, data loss, system crashes, and so on. Who knows you might even end up on a terrorist watch list or you could be a victim of identity theft. Maybe Autodesk customers should thank Autodesk for looking out for them, for letting them know the folly of working with partners and colleagues who have not yet placed that same trust in Autodesk.

Now I thought about this for a while and wondered. The ODA has many, many members, at least hundreds of members, although I don’t know the exact count. Many very reputable and high quality companies. You can see the list at http://www.opendesign.com/membership/sustain.htm.

These companies have hundreds of thousands of customers, maybe millions, all of whom interface with customers who either also use AutoCAD directly themselves, or work with partners who use AutoCAD. This has been going on for years. Clearly, the vast majority of DWG files they write with ODA libraries work fine, no problems. But Autodesk decided, in their customers’ interest of course, to pop up an onerous warning dialog box for every DWG file not written by AutoCAD. It appears that this warning is issued irrespective of whether any problem is identified, but only if the trademarked and encrypted “trust” signature is not present.

Now put yourself in the place of an Autodesk customer. You’ve been working with partners for years who use another product, and suddenly now every time you open a file from them you get this warning…for your protection. Maybe you get this warning many times each day…for building trust.

Do you recall those commercials that ran a while back, the ones that showed some anonymous marketing team coming up with these ill-conceived marketing ideas. I can’t remember what the commercials were advertising, but I just recall they would be talking about an idea and then you would see the harebrained scheme as it would have been realized, and the result was nothing like they intended.

So I am imagining this type of team at Autodesk and trying to envision their meeting when they hatched the trust initiative. I can just see it, “wait, what if we embed a string in our files, and trademark it, and then whenever we open up a file we look for that string, and if the file comes from another vendor’s software, even if the file is a good file, since it won’t have the string we will pop up a warning, a really dramatic warning that all hell could break loose. Imagine how this could reinforce the quality of our own files, because our files would never pop up this dialog box. Maybe then our customers would begin to insist that their colleagues quit using the software they have and switch to our software. Sales would go up. We would be heroes. And there is no way they could do anything about it, because if they do they will violate our trademark. Sales will definitely go up, and best of all our customers’ trust in us will increase. It’s brilliant. Let’s go get some sushi!”

And then again, monkey’s might fly out of my butt.

So in the end, who actually does any of this benefit?  Will those using other vendors' products switch to Autodesk software so their files will be trusted? What happens if, as an Autodesk customer, every file you open from someone using a non-Autodesk product works just fine after you dismiss the trust warning?  What if you open a file from an Autodesk product that doesn't display the trust warning and AutoCAD crashes?  No, that would never happen.

So Autodesk has requested a jury trial to prove their claims of loss of reputation and monetary damages. As it stands, the judge has granted Autodesk a temporary restraining order and the ODA has updated their libraries in response.  So what happens next?

The ODA is a non-profit organization focused on giving customers more ownership over their own data. The idea being that if you create a file in AutoCAD you should have the right to pass that file to anyone else using software from another vendor, and if anyone else creates a file in another vendor’s software they should be able to give it to you for further editing in AutoCAD. This is what the ODA libraries provide. Autodesk is a large for-profit public company, so legal maneuvring works in their favor.  Unfortunately, this is one of the flaws in our legal system.

But wouldn’t it be something if this case did go to a jury trial, and in the process Autodesk was forced to reveal that files created by their own software actually end up causing just as many problems -- maybe even more -- for their customers than those generated by ODA libraries. Wouldn’t it be rich for them to “win” on legal technicalities but in the process expose this for the cynical and misguided maneuvering it is. The classic ending would come with the jury wisely seeing this for what it is and awarding them $1 in nominal damages, no $3, since they have requested treble damages.

At the end of the day, the lawsuit might actually be good for everyone as it sheds light on what this is really all about – unfettered ownership of your data.

And trust.

Comments

[R. Paul Waddington]

Right on the mark Greg. Not only have you read the reasons for this action as some of us have it will come as no surprise that Autodesk do even worse, to their customers, than they are accusing ODA of. Autodesk actually state, in one of their products, that it cannot save files in an earlier AutoCAD format and this message dialogue box is absolutely false. Autodesk are claiming ODA is trying to deceive us when in actual fact most of we users know we may have compatibility issues when we share files and take steps to address the problems, we do not need Autodesk to rub our noses in the fact that our trusted customers and contractors have chosen to use differing products. We also know if we work with customers using differing Autodesk products we are going to experience similar, and sometime, worse compatabilty problems than files from other non-Autodesk products. As a long term Autodesk customer I believe it is Autodesk that is deceiving we users, not ODA's files or ODA, by making the statements Autodesk do. Furthermore I have written as much to Carol Bartz at Autodesk and I suggest all other Autodesk software users do the same. Autodesk should pull their horns in and withdraw from this suit and get on with the task we pay them for, that is developing software tools to improve our productivity and profitability something they seem to have totally forgotten to do.

[Scott Wertel]

“wait, what if we embed a string in our files, and trademark it, and then whenever we open up a file we look for that string, and if the file comes from another vendor’s software, even if the file is a good file, since it won’t have the string we will pop up a warning, a really dramatic warning that all hell could break loose. Imagine how this could reinforce the quality of our own files, because our files would never pop up this dialog box. Maybe then our customers would begin to insist that their colleagues quit using the software they have and switch to our software. Sales would go up. We would be heroes. And there is no way they could do anything about it, because if they do they will violate our trademark. Sales will definitely go up, and best of all our customers’ trust in us will increase. It’s brilliant. Let’s go get some sushi!”

I can't help but think how this will backfire. PDF is now the de factor 2D standard. No longer is dwg or dxf the standard. DWG and dxf are legacy standards that companies have to deal with until the day comes to convert those files into a more "updated" format - I'm strictly referring to MCAD data and the inevitable transition to 3D.

As a fellow data-sharer, I know very well that I can't control my vendors, customers, partners, or suppliers choices in CAD. They are going to use what they are going to use no matter what I insist upon. If I continue to get a warning every time I open up one of their files, I'm going to change the one thing I can - AutoCAD. This annoying dialog box is only going to motivate me to circumvent it, or to get rid of it all together. I get rid of it by dropping AutoCAD and switching to an application that doesn't annoy. It's brilliant. Let's go get some sushi.

[cadmonkey]

I thnk it is a really good idea to identify heterogeneous files. I for one like to know exactly where my files originated! Keep up the good work Autodesk! ODA is a group of control freaks. Gee, what ever happened to good 'ol Evan anyway??