[jbay808]

I strongly agree! I often wonder why a big alliance of industrial companies (say Ford, Toyota, Airbus, Mitsubishi...) hasn't formed to create a high-performance open-source mechanical CAD, modelling software. Surely they each pay a fortune in proprietary licenses each year? It seems like it would save them a lot in the long-run to back an open-source standard and then just pay a small amount each year to support its maintenance.

[artemonster]

"I often wonder"... because fucking "nobody was fired for buying IBM". For your average section manager of an engineering unit, CAD costs are just plain old "resources", just as engineers. As long as these costs are in check, NO ONE would risk their warm and fluffy high paid positions in undertaking such risky initiative. Even proposing one. Remember, initiative is punishable. This craeates a culuture of hairless (or grey-haired) high-paid impotents (in a figurative and literal sense) that would do as little as possible to risk their position, including taking initiatives with high rewards (like developing open source CAD tools).

[DanTheManPR]

Cost aside, it would do wonders for productivity if everyone was using the same tool. Right now, collaborating with customers and suppliers on design work is often difficult due to mutually incompatible data formats (even between old and new versions of the same tool).