U.S. Army Research Lab Opens BRL-CAD Source

brlcad writes "After 20 years of active development under a proprietary government license agreement, the BRL-CAD solid modeling suite has just been released as Open Source software. BRL-CAD is one of the many legacies of the late Michael Muuss, author of ping. The package began on the PDP-11 and VAX 11/780--before the emergence of ANSI/ISO C language standards--and boasts one of the first parallel Ray tracers in existence. Today BRL-CAD has over 750,000 lines of source code. It incorporates both 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, and supports an API for user-developed geometric analysis applications. It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners. Various portions of the package are distributed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses."

Re:Interesting...

[PseudoSchizo]

Not as advanced as MY package, it's ribbed for EVERYTHING's pleasure.

Ben 'Jammin

Re:The army putting a foot on our side = good

[Anonymous Coward]

The important thing here is, if the US Army learns that GPLing their code can be beneficial for them, we can get a very powerful ally.

Especially when it comes to "enforcing" the GPL.

Re:The army putting a foot on our side = good

[aixou]

I think it'd be better if the Air Force was on our side. Just call up someone high on the inside " We're gonna need an unmanned airstrike at 122.125 west 47.681 north. Yeah, it's Fallujah."

Re:In a world dominated by...

[FooBarWidget]

"It's the "if it's cheap, it must not be good" mentality that really does apply to CAD software..."

No problem. I'd be happy to sell this software for $3000 per copy.

Re:In a world dominated by...

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. I'd be happy to sell this software for $3000 per copy.

Does it come with a dongle?

Re:CVS repository goes back 17 years!!

[andreMA]

CVS was publically released in 1896

I hesitate to ask what it ran on...

Re:The army putting a foot on our side = good

[justins]

Consider the outcry you hear every time when this group of "father rapers" turns out to be using a piece of FOSS software. "We should modify the license to specifically ban the military from using our app!"

Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm really sick of all the talk about "father rapers" in the open source community. It happens so often, it's pretty much all you read about. "Father rapers this," "father rapers that". It's almost as if there is nothing else people want to talk about.