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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS. When you buy software it's an investment - you invest your time in integrating it into your workflow and your employees learning to use it... your investment is tied to the future of that software.

If it's FOSS (funded), no amount of money autodesk throw at it can bury it's source code, buying it would guarantee to some degree a future in the software and thus your investment. Even if autodesk bought the originating company.

But this would take a widespread cultural change in the values of architects combined with the first company willing to gamble on that business model. If a large group of architects are willing to sign a letter like this, perhaps now is the opportune moment to try and spread that value to avoid this problem in the future.

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> Small company rises to produce quality software, it sells, responds to bugs, listens to users, adds features etc.

I would say:

Small company invests time and money into creating a decent enough product. They listen to customers to build their roadmap and respond to most bugs in a reasonable time. Small company could grow to a medium or large and still hold true to their roots.

Large company buys a mediocre to decent company instead of doing R&D. New company is integrated into large companies suite of products.

Large company fixes only enough to keep the product running or shuts it down completely. Support loses its personal touch and is transferred to the cheapest FTE location. Large company’s corporate politics causes infighting between departments with similar products.

Large company merges with equally large company to reduce competition. Execs cash out and leave ASAP. That’s where I work now.

Sorry I edited away your quote since it was implicit in parent.

Your elaboration sounds more accurate i agree, but I think the end result is the same (a dead product with buried source code and wasted investment from it's users).

I work for a competitor in this space, and we make a living off of poaching AutoDesk customers. We're owned by a pretty deep-pocketed holding company as well, so I don't think we're going to get bought.

IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software background (so right-to-modify does nothing for them).

FOSS is just ... a bad deal for them. They want someone they can call and yell at when they're on a deadline and the software isn't working, and they want tools that get out of their way.

I get where you are coming from, but when I say FOSS i do not necessarily mean a "FOSS project"...

I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisitions repugnant to the likes of Autodesk (since all that would achieve is funding the software that competes with theirs)... I know that is far from easy to achieve and there is no straight forward business model for that - like I said, i'm probably being too idealistic.

[edit]

I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy (i.e what happened to blender, but as a requirement)... that would prevent takeovers that do not benefit users as a kind of legally binding promise while also sidestepping the issue of being profitable while developing niche FOSS software.

If legally feasible this is a nice promise any currently existing software company can add to their products without changing their business model.

In fact thinking about this, as someone who pretty much never buys software anymore, not because I am unwilling to spend money, but because the experience of having the rug pulled from under me too many times frankly makes closed source unpalatable to me - this would make buying (currently) non-free closed source software a lot more comfortable again.

It also feels like a good strategy to combat anti-competitive monopolies like autodesk from destroying choice in software.

"I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition or bankruptcy"

The KDE-FreeQt foundation is such a mechanism: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow

> I wonder if such a legal mechanism exists which automatically triggers FOSS licensing upon acquisition

I can't imagine a VC funding a company with a poison-pill clause like this. Such a clause would discourage acquisition, and don't most VCs (if not most founders) hope for acquisition as a very desirable exit strategy?

I think it's definitely possible. Look at Blender and GRASS GIS, some of the most successful open source projects among non-programmers of all time. Architecture tool is merely the midpoint between those too domains, right? :D

Blender was originally a closed-source product by Not a Number Technologies (NaN). After NaN went bankrupt, the creditors agreed to let Blender become released as open source for 100,000 €.

True, but not really relevant. (Unless you're implying that you think Autodesk is likely to go bankrupt and might be open to a similar arrangement?)

The Blender we have today is much improved compared to the last version developed by NaN. Most of its major features today did not exist when it first become open source. It was certainly helpful to have a working core at the start—I'm not saying that the 100k € was a poor investment, by any means—but I would be surprised to find that there is much left of the original code by this point.

Agreed. Of course I don't think this is what GP was implying, at all, but for the record it would devalue a ton of work to say that Blender is where it is because it started as a closed source product.

Blender is where it is because the core organizers over the past decade have had a clear vision, great community management, and have worked their butts off to make the software as good as it is today -- in terms of UX, capabilities, performance, marketing... everything across the board.

When I started using Blender, it was not as powerful or usable as other software in the field. It was impressive, and having a good core did help, but the program today has just advanced so far, I'm not sure it's really comparable.

See also Krita, for another Open Source project I think is headed in the same direction as Blender. None of this stuff happens by chance, developing Open Source software that's popular with a general non-programmer audience is really stinking hard, and the teams that can pull it off deserve all of the praise they get.

Architecture tools are way more niche. I think a better place to look is mechanical CAD: how many decent open source mechanical CAD programs are there? Approximately one: SolveSpace. And that is quite basic - even simple stuff like bevels is not supported. Absolutely nobody whose livelihood depended on it would use it.

It's just too niche and too complicated for there to be enough developers willing to writing it for free.

How much money would be needed to turn SolveSpace into something usable?

Call Siemens and ask what they charge for Parasolid. Hint: you have to ask, so...

Computational Geometry is hard. FOSS CG Kernels are not going to spring from the ether. CGAL exists, but its target audience is CG researchers. OpenCASCADE exists, but it's really a loss-leader for proprietary extensions and consulting contracts.

Maybe they can spring from a consortium of interested architects.

At a complete wild guess I would say something like $50m.

(Obviously it depends what you mean by "usable" - I use it now, so in a sense it is already usable. I guess you mean to get to the point that businesses would rely on it.)

My uneducated guess was that engineering tools have a lot more hard requirements than architecture CAD. That's why architects higher engineers to say whether their buildings will fall down!

Blender is programming-adjacent (a lot of Blender users are employed by software businesses to create assets for distribution with software products). In particular, I think that's where a lot of the funding for it comes from.

> Perhaps i'm being idealistic but if the cycle is that aggressive this screams for architects to start caring about buying FOSS.

Look at the city government of Munich. They tried to adopt Linux and FOSS but failed after years of internal issues. Proper support and industry adoption are important properties not easy to emulate for FOSS.

They "failed" because the social party mayor didn't get re-elected and a conservative mayor got elected. The new mayor then blamed LiMux for problems that mainly rooted in the ongoing migration of all departments to LiMux and then ordered the migration back to Windows for a price that would have had LiMux running for decades.

By total coincidence, shortly after announcing the move back to Windows, Microsoft announced to relocate their German headquarters from Hamburg to Munich.

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