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Open Source Engineering Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-than-a-digital-protractor dept.

pipingguy asks: "A long-time subscriber to my piping design/engineering-related discussion list inquired about Open Source engineering software (and expressed an interest in moving to Linux), citing the high cost and often poor customer support of the commercial packages. Since there are quite a few non-Software Engineers reading Slashdot, I thought I'd ask a 'somewhat larger' userbase by posting the question here. What Open Source engineering software is out there and useful?"

1 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Scientific Applications of Linux by The_Dougster · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The following webiste has served as a central index for engineering and scientific related applications which run on Linux, and it has been around for quite a while.

    Scientific Applications on Linux

    The site lists both free and commerical applications.

    For a drafting program, I would recommend QCad which is a nice GPL 2D drafting package. Unfortunatly I am not aware of any GPL 3D drafting programs which are either robust or mature enough for industrial use. Periodically I attempt to get TurboCad running under Wine, but while it seems to be getting closer to working, still no success yet.

    Don't overlook the Python Programming Language which has a variety of extensions which make it very suitable for number crunching applications. Its is fairly easy to learn how to make GUI-based applications for specialized purposes, and its speed of development combined with robust error-checking and interpreted execution mode makes it ideal for implementing small engineering solutions.

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