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."

In a world dominated by...

[BJZQ8]

In a world dominated by things like UniGraphics, AutoCAD, and Pro/Engineer, it will be nice to have a professional-level CAD package available under a less-restrictive license...But I don't see it challenging the established niches of those previous packages for awhile. It's the "if it's cheap, it must not be good" mentality that really does apply to CAD software...

The army putting a foot on our side = good

[KiloByte]

It's not really about the package in question. 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.

Besides, that piece of software was developed for your (and even a bit of my) money anyway...

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

[ScentCone]

we can get a very powerful ally

Because, otherwise the US Army is not a very powerful ally? People can split all the hairs they want about what the army is called to do, but they do it at the behest of elected officials. As an institution, though, you'll never have a better "ally" than the US military.

What the comment really does is illustrate the cultural distance between the military and the techno/edu/info people of the world. There is no them-us dynamic here folks: them IS us, and a lot of those military IT people will find themselves applying for your job some day!

Open Source or Free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the licenses are the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD, wouldn't it be more appropriate for the summary to say that BRL-CAD had been released as Free, rather than Open Source Software? This is Slashdot, where people are expected to know the difference.

Re:In a world dominated by...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is more geared towards blast stuff (BRL is Blast Research Labs) than typical CAD.

And if you're looking for format support, Eclectic is a nice gpl app that can do some conversions pretty fast (ie to a facetized instead of CSG format).

http://www.thermoanalytics.com/products/eclectic /

That said, there are some places where it has 'caught on' already. It's a live project and won't be going away for a very long time.