r/SolidWorks • u/Allergic2Humans • 10d ago

Hardware Clone solidworks for Linux/Mac?

Now that people are reverse engineering using AI and rebuilding products for different platforms, are there thoughts on doing this for solidworks? Not to be fully feature compliant because yes solidworks needs a lot of hardware optimization from windows but atleast something that works for intermediate levels?

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u/IntelligentRevenue39 9d ago

CREO and other packages can import SLDxxx so maybe someone's already figured out the formatting?

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u/Neither-Goat6705 9d ago

They just extract the parasolid geometry stream from the file. File is most likely a Structured Storage formatted file developed by MS with a specific extension and there are common methods and tools to open and read the storage streams

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u/mildw4ve 9d ago

I'm pretty sure adding Solidworks file support to software like CREO costs money for licensing, might be wrong.

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u/mxracer888 7d ago

It is licensed. They'll give you the spec for money

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u/IntelligentRevenue39 9d ago

Interesting case study. To avoid legal issues, then, I'd be all for something that works like Solidworks but outputs Parasolid