On 3/22/19 2:14 PM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
Anyone on here have opinions on Fusion 360 Cad/Cam by Autodesk?
Opinions is one thing, experience is another. After few mentions about Fusion on this mailing list in the past I briefly looked at it and that was it. Anything from here is my _opinion_ based on a lot of experience.
Any engineer worth his keep ran CAD CAM programs on minicomputers of some kind; Digital, HP, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems. All that kept healthy competition going until it became bastardized with ports to Windows". Anybody or a company that is so narrow minded to produce their software product for one crappy OS is STUPID! They are under false impression that "free software" is only free in terms of $$$ so there's no money in it. Wrong! We proved this time and time again, free software is free as freedom which is not necessarily absolutely free and run if there is any grain of decency in for profit user.
Last week of February this year I "celebrated my 25 years of Linux" with creating a wiki page on internal site at work. In there I described my experience and inserted numerous pictures of Linux distributions I bought in the past. First was a set of 49 floppy disks from Linux Systems Labs which besides at home, I also installed it at National semiconductor as the first Linux server. That was running at least two more years I was told after I left the company. Why stay when the manager told me there is no future in Linux. She sent me to "Windows 95 reeducation camp" in San Francisco that year.
My Linux experience helped me find interesting jobs because I kept supporting and studying it with buying 6CD set from ImageMagic, Progeny Linux, Redhat, Mandrake, etc. and FreeBSD.
I believe that if I use "free software" of some kind commercially I have a moral obligation to contribute in some way and I encouraged that at different work places. One of my managers approved purchasing GNU package for Windows in late 90s.
I would call "greedy bastard" anybody that would run a "(machine shop) of some kind making huge profits with free software without providing some kind of support to people that developed it. Send them $$$ or invite them to your shop for consulting; travel expenses included. That would give you bragging rights to advertise "We actively support <whatever software or product>" on your main web page.
A number of us, members of Silicon Valley Linux Users Group, volunteered for years installing Linux on personal computers for those who brought them to Linux Install-fest organized at Cisco, North San Jose. This was a good will to software developers mainly so that they would be encouraged to develop software for/on Linux platform.
There is a number of good examples of software projects that started as open source and evolved into commercially supported version with proprietary enhancements only available for $$$. I have no problem with that as long as the data and config file formats remain compatible with free version.
This kind of "business model" allows people to learn basics of a software product for free then switch to commercial version (because they know it) for profit.
My conclusion after reading long thread that grew out from "Fusion 360" is ConFusion. Now I wonder about their Eagle acquisition also. "2 schematic sheets, 2 signal layers, and an 80cm2 board area." PCB with 80cm2 only? Really?
Sorry, but Autodesk "embrace and extinguish" business model is not for me. -- Rafael Skodlar _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
