Sounds like a big Achilles heel to civilization in some ways.. :D
I mean, even with search engines, there is more competition..
Am I the only one to find it crazy that basically all of engineering is using the same proprietary constraint solver that only one company knows how to build?
Perhaps, but it’s a surprisingly complicated problem and at the same time a highly specialised one. Having the big players in the CAD world, who all need to solve much the same problem here, essentially funding a small group of specialists enough to work on it might just be economic incentives doing their job.
I have no insider knowledge about this, but given that D-Cubed was first bought by UGS (a customer, and a direct competitor of many of its other customers) prior to becoming part of Siemens, I expect the lawyers all had provisions in place to deal with any dependency concerns.
It probably also becomes clear now why Russian systems use a different product.. :D
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACIS
Even Autodesk use a fork of an old version of ACIS they own: