Opening the playing field for small businesses + solo developers

I build permissively-licensed open-source tools that help small businesses, independent developers, and researchers work with proprietary file formats where open implementations have historically been unavailable — reducing the cost of entry for newcomers to markets where incumbent tooling has been the only practical option.

The pattern I work against

In some software markets, vendor market share depends as much on file-format ownership as on product quality. When a user's working data lives in a binary format that only one vendor's software can read at full fidelity, that user's ability to evaluate competitors, migrate between products, archive independently, or build complementary tools is constrained by access to format documentation rather than by technical merit.

Vendors are, of course, within their rights to design and license their file formats however they see fit. Equally, open alternative implementations created under the legal frameworks that expressly permit reverse engineering for interoperability offer a balancing option — and when those implementations are released under a permissive license like Apache-2.0, downstream developers can actually use them in commercial products without relicensing their own work. My work is to build those implementations for as many formats as I reasonably can.

Current projects

dwg-rs — Apache-2.0 Rust reader for Autodesk DWG files (R13 through R2018 / AC1032). Clean-room implementation against the Open Design Alliance's freely-redistributable Open Design Specification for .dwg files (v5.4.1). No Autodesk SDK, no ODA SDK, no GPL-3 dependency.

rvt-rs — companion Apache-2.0 reader for Autodesk Revit .rvt / .rfa files. Same clean-room posture.

Both projects are pre-1.0 alpha. Coverage numbers, scope limits, and known gaps are documented in each repo's README.

Legal posture

I take the legal framing seriously because small errors here invalidate the entire approach:

• Implementation is exclusively against publicly-redistributable format specifications (for DWG, the ODA's freely-published specification PDF) and public reverse-engineering research — never against a proprietary SDK's source code.
• Contributor PRs carry a clean-room declaration affirming the same.
• GPL-licensed implementations (such as LibreDWG) and NDA-protected vendor documentation are not consulted during development.
• Reverse engineering for interoperability is expressly permitted under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) in the United States, and specifically for DWG under the 2006 settled case Autodesk, Inc. v. Open Design Alliance (N.D. Cal.), which permits third-party DWG implementations.
• Trademark attribution is explicit. DWG is a trademark of Autodesk, Inc. Revit is a trademark of Autodesk, Inc. These projects are not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Autodesk.

Where your sponsorship goes

Every sponsorship funds continued development:

• Format-specification research and spec-errata documentation
• Test corpus expansion across every shipping format version
• End-to-end decoder coverage improvements — raising accuracy from current alpha baselines to stable releases
• Write-path completion so downstream consumers can round-trip, not just read
• Fuzz testing of parser attack surfaces (these modules accept untrusted binary input)
• Mirror work for related formats where the same interoperability pattern applies

Reach

• GitHub: @DrunkOnJava
• Project issues on each repository for technical questions
• Security disclosures via each repo's GitHub Security Advisories flow