Everyone has a price. Can we all agree that if somebody offered Autodesk $100 million, they would sell Softimage in a heartbeat? Their shareholders would demand it.
Okay. So somewhere between zero and $100 million is the real, magic number. We have only to get somebody at Autodesk to put it in writing -- or somehow appeal to the shareholders directly. The network of people and studios who are very upset about this is already significant, and they have the collective ability to put together and disseminate perhaps the most polished crowdfunding campaign the world has ever seen. Keep in mind that not only would existing customers contribute, but also many champions of open source and lovers of computer graphics would help to expose SI's source code to the light of day -- the kind of money you couldn't get ahold of by trying to raise money the conventional way, for a conventional company. For those who've already given up: at some point we (as a culture, as a species) have to move beyond raw, unthinking capitalism. Far from an isolated casualty, this is yet another example where humans reflexively decide they have no power in the face of an impersonal corporation. It is simply not right for a company to take possession of something loved by so many only to bury it in the ground, for no other reason than PROFIT. It's all "just" bits on a hard drive, and there's no reason it can't be out in the wild helping people to create beautiful things. The fact that so many are just rolling over and giving up, as if this is perfectly acceptable behavior for a company in the year 2014, is the real tragedy here. And for anybody who maintains that Autodesk would never part with SI due to patents -- Google has already set a precedent for this: https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/pledge/ . Autodesk could similarly pledge not to enforce its Softimage-related patents so long as nobody tries to re-commercialize anything deriving from the source code. Win-win. *Autodesk, what is your price?*
