Habilidades Perceptivas

The roots of the 3D CAD industry can be found in the established practice of using drawings to record and communicate designs for the manufacture and use of products and the increasing use by large organisations of mainframe computers in the 1960s. The software is

246 http://osrc.blackducksoftware.com/data/licenses/ [accessed 1 August 2015]

GPL v.2 licence is used for roughly 40% of open source software projects and over 60% of all projects use GPL including the Linux project.

247 Mikko Valimaki and Ville Oksanen, ‘Patents on Compatibility Standards and Open Source – Do Patent Law Exceptions and Royalty Free Requirements Make Sense?’ (Sept 2005) 2 (3) SCRIPT-ed. The latest versions of Apache license and Open Software License have similar clauses.

248 Jay Kesan, ‘The Fallacy of OSS Discrimination by FRAND Licensing: An Empirical Analysis’ (2011) Illinois Public Law l Research Paper number 10-14. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1767083

249 Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman, The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic Development (MIT Press 2010)

82 overwhelmingly proprietary software produced by a small number of suppliers. While standards are widely used in the industry there is no evidence of open source software having any significant use or influence on interoperability. The study of the evolution of the software and the suppliers is a story of proprietary software.

4.6.1 Pen and Ink to CATIA V6 4.6.1.1 By Hand - The Drawing Board

Since the industrial revolution, and probably before that, drawings have been used by engineering and manufacturing organisations to design products, to communicate designs to the factory floor, subcontractors and customers, and to store a considerable part of the organisation’s intellectual property.

Traditionally, designs were produced by teams of draughtsmen working at drawing boards with pencils on large sheets of paper.

The Drawing Office of the Armstrong-Siddeley Company, Coventry

In the real world, products are three dimensional. To conceptualise a 3D product, and then to produce by hand a formal two dimensional (2D) drawing takes enormous skill, is extremely time consuming, and is prone to errors which have to be ironed out by manufacturing several prototypes.

83 The time consuming nature of manual drawing meant that detailed designs were often not produced for every part, leading to the requirement for high levels of craftsmanship on the shop floor, potentially incompatible parts, and uncertainty about capturing design changes as the product evolved over time.

Hand Drawn Visualisation of Rolls Royce Merlin Engine Supercharger Arrangement

It is very time consuming and difficult to manually produce three dimensional (3D) images for manuals and publicity material. Design reviews and cooperative working are limited by the availability of paper drawings, and it is difficult to convey an idea of the proposed design to non-technical people. Stress analysis, often a vital part of the design process, has to be undertaken by hand, a difficult, time consuming and frequently inaccurate process, one which was frequently ignored by making designs heavier and hence more expensive than they really needed to be.

4.6.2 2-D Electronically - Keep Calm and Undo

With the advent of electronic computers, systems were designed which mimicked the operation of a drawing board and pen, by producing a 2D drawing on a screen which could be easily edited and subsequently printed. These Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems had considerable advantages over the traditional paper based approach, as they allowed

84 the designer to produce drawings more accurately and quickly. As well as decreasing design time, CAD led to reduced manufacturing errors. It was said that the McDonnell Douglas MD11 airliner, designed with an early CAD system, was the first aircraft in which the carpets fitted first time without trimming. The advent of the IBM compatible PC (1983) and the introduction of Autodesk’s AutoCAD software package (1988) meant that 2D CAD was within the reach of even modestly sized companies, and its use spread very quickly.

AutoCAD Screenshot

2D CAD systems were and are a considerable step forward, but they are really only improvements on the traditional drawing board – 2D solutions for a 3D world.

4.6.3 3D – Approaching the Real World

The ability to design components in 3D is a huge advantage, but presents formidable difficulties. The algorithms required to describe and represent 3D shapes and curves are complex, and they require enormous computing power to process and display. As the algorithms have become more ubiquitous and the cost of processing power has fallen, the use of 3D CAD has become very widespread. Even companies of modest size are able to use 3D CAD to design complex products accurately and quickly, and to analyse and predict the product’s performance, as well as automatically building Bills of Material and keeping track of design iterations.

85 The 3D CAD market is a distinct market defined by the nature of the product. The market has been described as visual design authoring for product idea generation, visual collaboration and virtual simulation of products or processes - primarily for the design phase but also for planning and maintenance.²⁵⁰

It emerged as a market in the 1980s when CATIA, UGS and PRO/Engineer were first sold as 3D modellers. At that time there was a close link between the software suppliers and the hardware producers. The software was limited by the processing capabilities of the hardware and could only run on a limited range of hardware and operating systems. For example in the mid 1980s the UGS primary platforms were minicomputers from Data General and Digital. PTC designed PRO/Engineer to work on multiple platforms but focused on UNIX as its primary operating system. The hardware and software combined were very expensive – the price for a UGS system started at $250,000. Eventually 3D CAD systems moved to PCs running the Windows operating system. More recent entrants such as SolidWorks were designed from the start to run on PCs.

4.7 Industry Competitors