This is very interesting news indeed. Not too terribly surprising, given how much Autodesk has been trying to insinuate itself into the 3D printing world - there sure have been plenty o' tweets from that company with the #3dprinting hashtag.

I've been using Autodesk's design applications for years, and have always been impressed with what they've had to offer. However, the company has been very, um, "creative" in the last few years in getting to squeeze more money out of their customers in order to keep using those tools. This makes me skeptical about their open-source Spark OS - is it only a matter of time/money before the open source slams shut a la Makerbot? Probably.

Then there's the issue of a software company taking a step into the hardware world, and winding up with egg on their faces. The comparison to Android seems more than a bit ironic, given Google's difficulty with the hardware/smartphone market. Will Autodesk learn from others' mistakes? I guess we'll find out. It should be interesting, though.

-Crawford