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Comment by geoka9 | Hacker News Reader

> I love autodesk...

I sure don't. Buying up the competition and killing it off (see Softimage). I would migrate from a proprietary package to Blender just to make sure Autodesk can't get its paws on it and wreck havoc to my pipeline once again.

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Oh holy fuck! I forgot abt softimage being killed by them

I went to mesmer animations labs school for softimage... (all still on SGI machines.

One of the best pieces of software ive used.

I was really good at building bodies on metaclay.

I built the entire human muscular system with meta clay, and was able to animate its movements in natural form. In 1995.

Sadly we had a tape backup system for all our data (these were all done on SGI machines) and after several years i lost that tape which hd all my projects on them.... i cant recall what format the backups were in.

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Also, whatever happened to Poser and Kai's Power Tools -- what are those groups upto these days?

Speaking of SGI, did you notice the sticker with SGI logo on Hiroyasu Kobayashi's photo in the article? I thought of it as a fun easter egg.

Hmm, but it's actually a spoof of the SGI logo. It's not one continuous line tracing the edges of a cube any more, it's several shapes in the same general arrangement as the original. And the text seems to say something like Animation Graphics or Innovation Graphics or Evangelion Graphics?

Good catch! I didn't check the logo well enough. I regard it as homage, not as trying to "appear as the real thing".

I love that you have also read Illuminatus!

Check ouy what I just bought at an art exhibit last week:

https://imgur.com/gallery/6pe0ccG

Don't blame Autodesk. Blame Avid for selling it to them. Avid never quite understood how to position it in its' lineup, and sold it at 1/10th the price it paid 10 years prior.

Avid are world leaders in buying and ruining software suites. Looking through their lineup you see a sad list of software that either used to be good, or could have been great.

HAHA You know where AVID came from?

Lucas film!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EditDroid

AVID adapted the Edit Droid into their editing system...

Not to mention Autodesk used to be proud of having their tools being used to destroy the environment [1].

https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/11102794489711329...

Reading the bit of that thread with the Autodesk CEO, I disagree with your assessment of their position. The CEO's response, in a nutshell, was that they aren't responsible for what people build with their software, but also that they provide free software for and support initiatives by green startups. He even said that Mr. Lemercier's passions was "appropriate and necessary"

What's more, Mr. Lemercier's asked that Autodesk no longer sell their software to dirty companies like the ones they were discussing. "Policing couldn't be easier...Don't accept their money."

Without even getting into the question of what Autodesk should or shouldn't do, I do think it's completely unfair to elide the difference between (declining Mr. Lemercier's idea) and (actively endorsing the environmental destruction found in Autodesk's downstream).

Contrast this with free software (eg blender which is gplv3) where the license grants users the freedom to use the software for any purpose, even purposes that the software authors do not approve of. So it seems silly to say autodesk is evil because of who they allow to use their software in a comment on an article about software which explicitly chooses to make no restrictions on their users.

In a different sense one could say that Autodesk is worse than Blender because its licensing model does allow the authors to make decisions on who might be allowed to use it.

A truly undervalued property of free software is that nobody can exert pressure on you for using it. Users can stay ideologically uncompromised.

Since we're having fun with eggcorns, the term is "wreak havoc."

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