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Commercial Interest In Open-Source 3D Environment

Posted by timothy on 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?"

5 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Open-Sourcing the Army by Justice8096 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ).

  2. West Point a croquet partnet by pkhuong · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://croquetproject.org/Community/consortium.htm 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 needed to simulate airplanes, etc.?

    On second thought... Agents fit particularly well in smalltalk's message passing paradigm... So does croquet's goal of seamless networking (iirc?), especially when simulating hundreds or thousands of agents. Smalltalk, the new lead (as in Pb) figurine! :)

    --
    Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
  3. It won't work by dshaw858 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  4. OSS is neutral on use... by Spoing · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.

    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  5. Distributed events... worrying by CrosbieFitch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Distributing events is too fragile.

    They're still over-fixated on synchronisation.

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