Re: "FREE" VisualMill

Message: 25
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 19:36:42 -0800
From: "Steve" <s.bromley@...>
Subject: Re: Re: "FREE" VisualMill

From: "Tim Goldstein" <timg@...>

> I can not believe that a bunch of you are all pissy about what they are
> offering and what it does. Who cares what the press release says.

I don't see any one getting pissy about what they are offering. I see
people getting pissed off about being lied to. Sure it wasn't an out and out
lie, just a marketing line.... Human nature. Tell some one you are going to
give them a Yugo, they will be more then happy to drive across town to pick
it up and will be very thank full. Tell them you are going to give them a
Lixus and have it turn out to be a Yugo and they will be pissed off, even
though it's a running car for free. It's to bad they offered cripple ware as
a full ver. People would have been happy to try it out as crippleware, now
they feel cheeted and are unlikely to trust the company. Delivering less
then implied, or said, is never a good idea, not even on free stuff.

It does look like nice software, seeing how they market makes me trust
their sales/marketing department less then I trust most sales men......

[What happened is that they were all set to release their 3.0 version (which
I was offering for about $3k earlier this year) for free, when they realized
they were courting a lawsuit from AutoDesk, which owns the DXF format, and
might well ask for a royalty on each copy whether it was sold or given away.
So they had to strip out the DXF import, which eliminated the 2.5d milling
function. This happened in the middle of last night, so there was some
disconnect between the prewritten publicity and the program as released. If
someone out there knows of a non-proprietary vector graphic format that
would be a good substitute for DXF, it might be possible for me to persuade
them to adopt it. In the meantime, forget about the 2d stuff, and consider
this the first free (for four months, any way) 3d CAM program that
adequately addresses STL mesh to G-code translation. It seems to me that
the CADCAM community would serve its interests better by greeting offers
like this with humble gratitude, in hopes of enticing other software
developers into similar givaways, rather than so relentlessly examining the
shortcomings of this gift horse's dentition.]

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com