First, as to subsetting Inventor -- exactly so. What attracts me to
the language is that it appears extremely regular and consistent. I
*suspect* that creating subset parsers would be pretty easy.
>By the way, there
>are several companies selling modelers which use the Inventor file format
>and libraries. That fact makes me believe that we won't get any trouble
>from SGI for promoting the OpenInventor data file format.
This doesn't entirely reassure me -- the info on the SGI home page
doesn't make it clear whether those companies are paying lisence
fees or not...
>There are no distribution royalties for the SGI executables because every
>SGI comes with Inventor run-time libraries. One easy way to start would be
>to use an SGI to create the first Mosaic-like client using Inventor. That
>executable and source could be freely distributed without royalties or
>legal action.
*Provided* you're only running on SGI machines, and moreover on SGI
machines with a recent version of IRIX (if I read the docs correctly,
Open Inventor doesn't run on older versions of the operating system).
That's a little limiting -- my company has only one IRIS, and it's
not up to IRIX 5.2 yet...
-- Justin
Who rather likes Inventor, but is a
compulsive Devil's Advocate...
Random Quote du Jour:
"I've always wanted to have my own PBS cooking show, entitled
"Make It From Scratch, You Idiot". In this show, I would
hold up a sample pre-prepared food product (cake-mix-in-a-box,
pitiful chocolate chip cookies), insult it for a few minutes,
then proceed to make one about 500 times better with minimal
effort, minimal cooking skills, and about 1/10 the money."
-- cj of the Legendary Stews