Hey Specke Team,
you’ve surely heard of it already, but Autodesk has recently released Data Exchange:
Seems to be heavily inspired by how Speckle works but covers much less functionality and hides behind a paywall.
I’m cheering Speckle on but it’ll be interesting to follow their development too.
Hey @mariuszhermansdorfer, thanks for the heads up! As you can imagine, we’re following things closely. We’ve had conversations in the past with some Autodesk Forge people (Jim Quanci IIRC, and some others), and I did do my best to explain the benefits of being object based rather than lobbing massive files around, so it’s good to see this resonated 
Was planning a longer reply, but you’ve nailed things - I don’t think there’s much to add to what you wrote above!
Hello @mariuszhermansdorfer and @dimitrie - Autodesk employee here! One minor correction on the ‘paywall’ - A docs subscription is required to write a data exchange, but not to read one. You need to be added to the docs project, and given permission, but no license is required to read the exchange into Inventor, Power Automate, Rhino, or Revit.
And yes, I’m a big fan of Speckle, the tech and community - and was a big fan of Flux prior to that - long time coming that Autodesk is addressing customer’s interoperability woes at the object level IMO.
Thanks for the clarification @Tobias_Hathorn. As I said earlier, it’s good to see Autodesk exploring this direction as well. Hopefully this will lead to healthy competition and maybe even collaboration with Speckle.
I for one would welcome Autodesk adopting and contributing to further development of an open-source standard.
I’m curious what that looks like to you @mariuszhermansdorfer - there are many open source standards, and many ways to contribute. So without assuming, I’d like to listen to any ideas you and the Speckle community might have in that area?
Agreed, there are many ways of collaboration. Here are a few ideas in a random order:
Nice, thanks for sharing your mind, I feel a sense of agency in some of these areas, not all. A few thoughts and links related to your list…
On File formats: Autodesk is moving away from files as the ‘source of truth’ - towards cloud based information models. File formats change each year - so they’re less durable than API access to the design data that’s been externalized from an authoring application. This was a main focus at AU. The Autodesk platform teams are buildng an awesome developer experience through GraphQL APIs - you can see what I mean in the new Fusion Data APIs
on ADN: I’m guessing you’re aware of these resources, so apologies to repeat: there’s the ADN Open option for start ups; The Developer Advocacy and Support (DAS) team does answer each support question that comes up on Stack Overflow - or on the desktop API forums.
On grants: This is a great idea, especially for the data platform to pursue - I’ve taken note. I am aware of a few related programs that Autodesk Foundation funds at the startup / company level - and students at the university / trades level.
On open source: This is where I would like to continue the conversation - Autodesk is moving in this direction - Autodesk’s github and Forge’s github. I would like to listen to other’s ideas how we can do more here. Both in terms of $ support (like the Blender example), and project contributions - especially around the Data Exchange project.
Ideas welcome!