Hacker News Reader

Siemens is currently trying to make the XT exchange file format into an international standard, perhaps they could overcome the objections to this by making Parasolid open source.

View on HN

Parasolid is really good and that's probably because it's a licensed product used in many commercial programs, so it's well supported. Maybe going GPL plus commercial could work, but it might just kill it.

They tried to standardize a previous version and were voted down, the reasons for negative votes have not changed, one of them is that the proposed specification isn't enough to implement a clean-room copy.

I will follow up on the open-source idea when we start discussing the next vote.

Please do. That seems viable, and potentially very beneficial!

X_T as in "Parasolid"?

Interesting, whats in it for them doing that? Also, considering JT which, as far as i know, is already an ISO standard?

The current ISO standard for JT just has an older version of XT as an informative annex, there is a proposal out for voting to make a newer version a normative (required) part of the standard.

Maybe it is intended as a marketing feature "Our exchange file is an ISO standard but the CATIA one is not".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com