Autodesk Forge

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Autodesk has announced a new $100 million venture which they are calling the Forge Initiative, which aims to bring together 3D developers and companies, large and small, to collaborate and develop products in the cloud. At the heart of the initiative is the new cloud-based Forge Platform, which will provide tools including APIs and SDKs for developers. Read more at 3DPrint.com: http://3dprint.com/108644/autodesk-forge-initiative/

[awerby]

"The maker movement and hacker culture are examples of how product development is becoming a much more collaborative process, and Autodesk’s new program shows that large corporations are beginning to recognize that. Rather than keeping new products tightly wrapped within a single company, more partnerships are emerging, and both new and established companies are being encouraged to share ideas."

This sounds pretty visionary, allright. But what happens to the Intellectual Property? If I've invented something, and trustingly send it into the Cloud, "sharing" it with the large companies lurking there, should I be surprised when I see that they've applied for a provisional patent on my idea? Our current system has switched from "first to invent" to "first to file", so even if I can prove they stole my idea, I will still lose in court. Another example of the "sharing economy", I guess...

Andrew Werby
Juxtamorph.com

[Sebastian Finke]

I'm a fan of neither the cloud nor Autodesk.

[curious aardvark]

well the 123d apps are actually pretty good.
Never could get my head around autocad - but the new stuff is pretty easy to use. And I have a book :-)

But cloud based cad is never going to work for me. On a good day I can get around 4.5 mb download and only 0.5mb upload speed.
Try playing around with cloud cad on that kind of speed.
It's just really really frustrating :-)

All cloud based services suck for me.