Editor's Note: Because Autodesk is currently engaged in litigation with ODA, the company declined to verify or comment on the content of this column. Statements about the transactions between Autodesk, Bentley, and ODA are based on the author's recollection.

Generating some surprise and raised eyebrows, Autodesk and Bentley Systems in early July announced an agreement to cooperate. The companies reported that they will exchange software libraries for accessing DWG and DGN format files as written by their respective applications and will support reciprocal use of one another's application programming interfaces (APIs).

The reaction to the announcement by analysts, press, and even users was quick. Most of the commentary I've seen has been well-considered and thoughtful (see for example, Cadalyst Executive Editor Kenneth Wong's analysis, "Bentley and Autodesk Join Hands to Bridge DGN and DWG," http://www.cadalyst.com/0708autodesk-bentley). What I hope to add to the mix is a bit of background and perspective.

A Little ODA History

In late 2002 when I was president of the OpenDWG Alliance (ODA, now Open Design Alliance, http://www.opendesign.com/), I made trips to the headquarters of Bentley and Autodesk.

I traveled to Bentley to meet with the company's top management, including CEO Greg Bentley and CTO Keith Bentley, to discuss the OpenDGN project. The clear message was that Bentley wanted to find a way to open its DGN V8 file format in a way that benefited its users — but without archrival Autodesk being able to unfairly take advantage of the situation.

Bentley decided to take two important steps: The first was to publish an OpenDGN file specification, making it available to its developer partners and customers who were members of the Bentley SELECT subscription program. The second was to provide documentation and technical support to the OpenDWG Alliance, from which ODA could create a set of independent software libraries to read and write DGN V8 format files. This second step involved a lot of careful contract negotiation.

Bentley had no problem with Autodesk using the OpenDGN libraries to be developed by ODA — so long as Autodesk was willing to join ODA, which would require Autodesk to provide ODA with information about its DWG implementation. Actually, Bentley would have been happy for this to happen — although no one thought it was likely, except possibly me.

I traveled to Autodesk headquarters to meet with Carl Bass, now CEO but COO at the time, and John Sanders, then vice-president of platform technology — the two executives designated by then-CEO Carol Bartz to deal with the OpenDWG Alliance. My first priority was to find out if the rumors were true about AutoCAD 2004 (due to ship in several months). I'd heard that Autodesk employees in Europe were saying that this next version of AutoCAD was going to create real trouble for ODA, because the DWG files it created were encrypted. The Autodesk executives assured me that this wasn't the case. I also wanted to discuss DGN. I told Bass and Sanders that we were developing DGN libraries and that the only way they could use them would be to join ODA. They told me, "No, thanks"; they just weren't all that interested in DGN.

That lack of interest apparently changed. In 2004, I found out that Autodesk had reportedly acquired ODA's DGN libraries (called DGNdirect) through an unauthorized transaction with an ODA member. I spent a good deal of time talking with lawyers and trying to determine how to avoid having the situation become a bunch of lawsuits. Ultimately, the acceptable options were to sue Autodesk for copyright infringement or to wait until the contract under which the company reportedly had acquired the libraries simply lapsed. The ODA board of directors showed little support for getting into a million-dollar legal fight with Autodesk, so I opted to avoid that approach. It took until May 2006 for Autodesk to finally stop shipping software based on DGNdirect. Needless to say, Bentley was livid about the situation.

One of the side effects of losing access to DGNdirect was that Autodesk needed to have a replacement. So, the company began developing DGN libraries of its own. Ultimately, these libraries didn't prove to be all that good.