autodesk

Like a lot of people, Timothy Vernor makes his living selling stuff on eBay he and his girlfriend acquire by scouring local garage sales. But his repeated attempts to resell packages of AutoCAD have led to a tussle with Autodesk and a square-off over the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

When Vernor first put a copy of AutoCAD up for resale on eBay, Autodesk said a sale would violate its copyright under the terms of the DMCA. eBay suspended the auction and Vernor responded with a DMCA counter-notice. When Autodesk failed to respond, eBay reinstated the auction.

A … Read more

Software plays a key role in the clean-tech world, whether helping consumers size up their carbon footprints and crunch the costs of solar panels, or aiding manufacturers in reducing toxicity throughout the supply chain.

Autodesk unveiled an add-in in April to enable designers using prototyping software Inventor to calculate the carbon emissions of an array of products.

The Sustainable Materials Assistant, available as a preview through Autodesk Labs, also adds up data about the toxicity and recyclability of materials used, and how the final result might comply with regional regulations.

Users must populate data fields with information about toxic ingredients, … Read more

Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another. If you're not a map nut, that's the challenge one might encounter switching, for example, from latitude and longitude to Universal Transverse Mercator--or from geocentric latitude to geodetic latitude, for that matter.

The software, acquired from Mentor Software and used within Autodesk products already, supports more than 3,000 coordinate systems, the company said. Norm Olsen, Mentor's founder and the programmer who created and supported the transformation technology, will be a senior software … Read more

I'll be honest: I didn't even know that Autodesk was doing anything with open source. As Directions Magazine points out, however, it does/has been, some of which sounds truly useful. Here's a taste:… Read more