Open Design Alliance

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The Open Design Alliance is an alliance of members that seeks to develop libraries for standard CAD formats. The main idea is to make CAD drawings more accessible and increase competition in the market for CAD software.

The ODA currently supports the 2 following CAD format :

DWGdirect to read and write the .dwg format (old name:OpenDWG)
DGNdirect to read and write the DGN format found in Microstation.

1 History
2 Members of the Alliance (not exhaustive)
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The Alliance was formed in February 1998 as the OpenDWG Alliance
2002, new name for the OpenDWG library: DWGDirect.^[1]
On October 2003 it was renamed to: Open Design Alliance.^[2].
On 22nd November 2006, Autodesk sued the Open Design Alliance alleging that its DWGdirect libraries infringed Autodesk's trademark for the word "Autodesk", by writing the TrustedDWG code (including the word "AutoCAD") into DWG files it created. In April 2007, the suit was dropped, with Autodesk modifying the warning message in AutoCAD 2008 (to make it more benign), and the Open Design Alliance removing support for the TrustedDWG code from its DWGdirect libraries.^[3]