> I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and

> I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. The problem for these businesses is that their internal CAD libraries are essentially proprietary tooling, they don't have an interest in making it open source, and much of the tooling around those libraries and software packages is proprietary or patented. It's kind of analogous to Qualcomm's stranglehold over cellular communications. If you don't pay them you're also throwing away decades of IP and tooling around it, and lose interoperability.