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Graphics Software

Commercial Interest In Open-Source 3D Environment 24

Posted by timothy from the giant-shoulders-cleared-for-standing dept.
cellulama writes "Is virtual reality back? A commercial vendor has started developing for Croquet, which is an open-source tool for collaborating and sharing data, with an emphasis on 3D visualization. The system was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for research and "co-creativity," but a company named 3Dsolve is looking for military applications. What's next -- open-source America's Army?"
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Commercial Interest In Open-Source 3D Environment More

Commercial Interest In Open-Source 3D Environment

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  • Open-Sourcing the Army (Score:4, Informative)

    by Justice8096 ( 673052 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @11:19PM (#11028126)
    I have yet to see any animosity towards open source in the military. They like open source because you don't have to wait 6+ months to get the purchase completed for proprietary stuff, and you don't have to worry about license problems when dealing with vendors ( the licenses can become a hostage towards keeping the contract ).
    • http://croquetproject.org/Community/consortium.ht m l:
      has a list of Criquet's core education partners, which includes (in the middle of institutions more usually associated with CS)... United States Military Academy at West Point. I wonder what _they_ see in it. We know the military have always been interested in 3D and VR, but why do they see a need to for croquet rather than a normal (and probably better suied to 1st person view and simulation) 3D toolkit? Dynamism and good introspection aren't really nee

    • You must not be familiar with the Navy's NMCI [wikipedia.org] then. It was basically an initiative by industry lobbyists to get the Navy to standardize on Windows 2000 for everything, along with a number of other commercial applications.

  • On the web page this is described as a completely new OS. What would prevent a new open source OS from gaining widespread acceptance now that running multiple OS's on one machine is common? The web page has set forth some ambitious goals for this project. If it lives up to the goals it should take off.
    • What would prevent a new open source OS from gaining widespread acceptance now that running multiple OS's on one machine is common?

      There many Open Source OSs that dont gain widespread acceptance.
      Linux, [linux.org] is still one of them. Although is is more widely accepted than OpenBSD [openbsd.org]

      ;-)

      • Yeah, but this one could just run as a user process. So if the need is there, it could gain acceptance much more easily. [and then they could subtly add in more and more applications until people are ready to just switch to Croquet. Mwahahah]

  • It won't work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dshaw858 ( 828072 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @12:41AM (#11028884) Homepage Journal
    I worked on Croquet with colleagues at the San Diego Supercomputer Center... it's some pretty gnarly code, written mainly in Smalltalk. I don't think that a commercial vendor would be able to deal with it; people who love code, yes... people who just want money from it... no.

    - dshaw
    • I don't think that a commercial vendor would be able to deal with it; people who love code, yes... people who just want money from it... no.

      Surprise ! There are people in commercial entities that love code, too ! *GASP* And they even sometimes can make money from this ! *BOOM**Head explodes*
  • I have been 'keeping up' on Virtual Reality, and I see it as a very close thing... Especially after reading the Tom Clancy: Net Force books (great books BTW).

    What really gets me, is that a google for virtual reality turns up this [navy.mil] as the first result. (it's neat, but seems kinda unrelated)

  • OSS is neutral on use... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @01:34AM (#11029224) Homepage
    OK, more specifically free software is neutral on how the software is used and who can use the software. Open source software tends to follow that as well.

    This means that if a mailing list manager is created by an ardent advocate of choice...the mailing list licence does not have a clause that says 'can not be used by right to lifers'. Or bisa-versa. If it does, it's not OSS or free software.

    Drug pushers, dictators, mass murders, bunny skinners, and traffic violators are treated the same as military or private users -- no matter what you think of any of these groups.

  • > The system was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

    All the coolest stuff happens in my hometown, but instead of going to school there I shipped off to Platteville, where the hicks and the imaginary engineers reign. Dumb me :P

  • Distributed events... worrying (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CrosbieFitch ( 694308 ) <crosbie@cyberspaceengineers.org> on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @06:02AM (#11030328) Homepage
    Distributing events is too fragile.

    They're still over-fixated on synchronisation.

    Gotta distribute state man. It's the only way.

    • The short version is that we have to ultimately have a distributed atomic transaction on our objects. In other words, at some point the system of replica objects has to commit to the same state everywhere in the same pseudo-time and as close to possible in the same real-time. If things go wrong -- and there are many kinds of things that can go wrong in a highly distributed system of machines and networks of different speeds and reliability -- we have to make sure that when the dust clears either the entire

  • If one does some research on General Dynamics, you'll see that they have done 3d tank simulations. If this appears to be anything related, and if the licensing is right, I'd bet on them picking it up if they can figure a way to keep it secret.
  • Demo's have to be done with least cost so the Army often sees alpha versions of stuff that vendors hope to sell running on RedHat. But when the money comes down, its for Solaris or maybe Windows NT or 2000...open source still scares the brass in the pentagon. After open source, the other trend in software [but one that is a worry for programmers rather than proprietors] is outsourcing...now that IS something I would like to see our DOD pursue more vigorously.

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