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:
There are some obvious marketing related facts about the first year of Autodesk's relationship with open source that make good print, some of which are noteworthy here: there were nearly 30,000 downloads of MapGuide Open Source in its first year of availability, and more than 4,000 downloads of the Feature Data Object (FDO) connectors to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Autodesk's entry into the open source community brought about the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) which provided a home for a Board of Directors, various committees and local chapters. The local chapters are particularly interesting, with groups in China, India, Japan and Canada ... and new chapters now forming in Brazil, France, Italy, Australia and New Mexico. The OSGeo website is already available in nine languages. It appears that the OSGeo folks have been very busy...
What do I know? Not very much. (Thanks to John Scott for sending the link.)