U.S. Army Research Lab Opens BRL-CAD Source 209
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."
F/OSS officially supported by US gov't. (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, much of this information is squelched by the press, since the press has shown to be woefully ignorant of F/OSS concepts. I would imagine many state and Federal agencies routinely violate rules requiring them to review F/OSS software due to ignorance. I've identified several instances of such a failure in the community college district where I work: Purchases and bids for proprietary software are routinely approved, and when I ask for a list of F/OSS alternatives that were considered, I'm greeted with a blank stare.
The bottom line is that F/OSS has made inroads, but without oversight from the F/OSS community, many of these initiatives are simply ignored and routinely violated.
Re:In a world dominated by... (Score:1, Informative)
CVS repository goes back 17 years!! (Score:3, Informative)
It is possible they have been using CVS all these years; CVS was publically released in 1896 [wikipedia.org], though I believe they may have alternatively used RCS [wikipedia.org] and migrated to CVS somewhere down the line.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Informative)
You had to register, and there were some restrictions from what i remember. But i admit its been 8+ years since i read it, so i could be totally wrong on that..
I registered, ( and used it ) back when you had to contact the FED's first.. They even gave out a complete set of printed manuals. Was pleasantly surprised when the box showed. I had not expected to get anything.. Scary when you get a call about an unexpected package from the DOD waiting for you at the office
One of the good examples of our tax dollars at work.
Re:F/OSS officially supported by US gov't. (Score:3, Informative)
When I was in the 1973rd Com Group (AF), there was a mandate/reg that said any project which required a greater than 30% change in source code was to be redone in Ada.
The civilians in our shop where clueless with Ada and only passable with COBOL. When one of the ladies was sent back from Ada training due to her complete lack of programing skill, Ada was blacklisted by the department heads.
From then on all projects that required more than 30% change were divided into smaller projects so they would not be affected by the 30% rule.
Worse than that, when one of the Sgts converted a project into Ada on his own, he was reprimanded and his code deleted... So much for Government regulations.
When a change is mandated that will challenge the skill (or lack of it) of an established department, it will be resisted in any and all ways possible. Mereley asking them to consider it will do nothing.
A tactic similar to EEO is probably the only thing that will ever be effective. ie. 25% of office software shall be FOSS by 2007.
Re:In a world dominated by... (Score:3, Informative)
From the overview:
- An assortment of geometric converters to convert to and/or from other geometry formats, including Euclid, ACAD, AutoCAD DXF, TANKILL, Wavefront OBJ, Pro/ENGINEER, JACK (the human factors model for doing workload/usability studies), Viewpoint Data Lab, NASTRAN, Digital Equipment's Object File Format (OFF), Virtual Reality Mark-up Language (VRML), Stereo Lithography (STL), Cyberware Digitizer data, and FASTGEN4.
Have an agenda or something?
Re:In a world dominated by... (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:In a world dominated by... (Score:3, Informative)
http://brlcad.org/VolumeIV-Converting_
indicates that it can export to STL and IGES.
Not even in the same class... (Score:3, Informative)
Think somewhere in the class of Solidworks and ProE- the DoD uses this tool to run simulations of survivability on models of our armor and other people's.
Unexpected and cool (Score:1, Informative)
For those people comparing it to POV or Blender, you're totally barking up the wrong tree. POV and Blender are focussed on making pretty pictures. BRL-CAD is about engineering modelling for things like unexpected EMP bombs next to your shiny new tank.
Re:OSX Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
BRL-CAD has a long history of running on many systems that range from your average desktop running Linux to Cray supercomputers fully taking advantage of the CPU resources on any of them. Support is presently actively maintained for Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris (*BSD usually just works). Support for Windows is there too, though it's only recently been a focus of development.
Some legacy platforms include the DEC VAX-11 running 4.3 BSD, DECStations running ULTRIX, SGI 4Ds running various versions of IRIX, Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS, the Cray 1, X-MP and Y-MP running UNICOS, the Cray 2, DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1, the Apple MAC II running A/UX, iPSC/860 Hypercube running NX/2, Alliant FX/8, Alliant FX/2800, Gould SEL, PowerNode, the Gould NP1, NeXT, HPPA 9000/700 running HPUX, the Ardent/Stardent, the Encore Multi-Max, and much more...
It's also been compiled on many versions of Linux, BSD, AIX, IRIX, Solaris over the years. Keep in mind just how old the project has been actively maintained. Two decades of supporting the latest and greatest is a lot of varied hardware and operating systems.
Re:Compare and contrast (Score:2, Informative)
That said, the power of the system's expressiveness, the performance and fidelity of the ray-trace engine, it's ability to deal with massively complex geometries, and more distinguish it quite a distance from many of the commercial projects. Similarly from a developer's perspective, there's now immediate availability to the sourcecode and interaction with developers to make it into whaever is desired.
The package was never written to be a user-friendly modeler. It was written by computer scientists specifically for the needs of vulnerability and lethality analysts. The tools are very numerical and informative. Many were written in a UNIX-spirit where you can tie tools and inputs/outputs together to achieve some desired end. There is 1 primary graphical tool in BRL-CAD akin to what you'd use in SolidWorks (MGED). There are 400 other command-line tools that do even more.
Now with the project as open source, hopefully the community will step forward and help make it what they want it to be. The US Army has given the community a great heads start.
Re:Corresponding Open Source 2D CAD? (Score:4, Informative)
QCad [ribbonsoft.com]
QCad is probably the closest thing to AutoCAD LT that you will find for Linux. It has a nice easy-to-use interface, seems mathematically correct, and is still under active development. Most Linux distros offer it as a binary package; i.e. apt-get install qcad or emerge qcad.
Other currently usable engineering type tools which you may or may not be aware of are:
What needs to happen is these tools should all be made to interact now. Draft your model in BRL-CAD (or Blender), run FEA on it using FElt, and then import views into QCad to dimension and plot out hardcopies. Some nice tight integration between these packages would be great.
Re:anyone familiar know if there's drawing/draftin (Score:2, Informative)