Slashdot Mirror
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."
This looks like a very advanced package. I wonder how it'll hold up to standards such a s POVRay? (pirst fsot?)
"Holy shit! A talking muffin!"
That headline was way over my head.
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...
by reading the docs which refer to analysing balistic impacts, i guess this system has some sort of finite element analysis package or at the least could be integrated with one. the is is a major gift to the emgineering community
Is it me or are the screenshots showing this puppy running on Mac OSX?
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...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
spacemarine@mars spacemarine $ ping -c3 some.com
PING get.some.com (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from get.some.com (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.056 ms
64 bytes from get.some.com (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.028 ms
64 bytes from get.some.com (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.050 ms
--- get.some.com ping statistics ---
3 BFG9000 rounds transmitted, 3 hits, 0% health loss, time 2005ms, 6 mofos fragged
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.028/0.044/0.056/0.014 ms
For there excellent and extensive documentation. Give's the project for the public a huge kickstart. But what happend to volume 1?
It continues to be developed and maintained by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and its partners.
I wonder how long that will last. Security, terrorists, blah blah blah.
Couldn't the Army take further develpment "private" without violating the GPL? (For those portions that are under the GPL.) My interpretation is that internal distribution wouldn't necessitate source distribution under the GPL, but then IANAL.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Behold the versatility of the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD quadra-license! With the viral nature of the GPL, and the total anarchy of the BSDL, it will be unstoppable!
But really, how come licensing comes to this? Is it from the authors placing more value on different portions of the code, or is it a condition posed by contributors, or what? I am not even barely a lawyer, and all of my personal code is of such little value that charging money or placing much in the way of conditions would be criminal.
I kind of see multi-licensing as having a different insurance policy for each fender on your car.
Back in the day, I requested a copy around '88. The only format available then was 9 track tape. I think I had to send a real letter requesting it and explaining my intent (curiosity, mostly).
After waiting many weeks, I sent Michael Muuss an email flaming a little (very young and cocky) and asking "Hey, where's my tape!?". I ran across a print out of that email and his reply when I was moving a few years back. He explained that he had to make the tapes himself, etc.
With much pain, I translated the tape to a QIC cartridge and built it on our Sun gear (I was working at an imaging company). It was a large build.
Their 3D editor was pretty neat for the day and I did a little with the ray tracer. The package had, no kidding, a lot of heavy duty ballastic tools that I didn't care about.. That was about it.
But the print out of Muuss' email is a keeper.
Some of you may not realize this, but the Federal government supports F/OSS. Several state governments (I know Texas does for certain) have passed mandates and recommendations that encourage and/or require state agencies to consider F/OSS solutions over proprietary solutions.
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.
It sounds to me like the U.S. Army is starting to see the advantage of open source software. They do not have to trust any closed source software vendor and they get the benefit of a large community developing the software for free. The fact that end users benefit from this is just a side-effect. Think about it, closed source software and armed forces do not mix well together. I still remember that incident when a Microsoft Windows NT system aboard a U.S. Navy vessel was responsible for accidentally firing off a missile back in the 90's.
Offtopic, but not a Troll. Please get it right.
Put this in perspective for me... how does it compare to SolidWorks? I found that super easy to use, but perhaps not as powerful as some other packages.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Is there a preferred/traditional way to also make 2D drawings/paperspace views of the models with this system? Also, capabilities for multiuser environment? I come from AutoCAD/ProE/AutoTrol background
Where's the repository of model files? I want to redesign the Navy's floating airport for civilian use in NYC.
--
make install -not war
Check out the repository for this project hosted on SF. Here's a link to the readme file history (dates back to 17 years, 11 months ago!!!).
It is possible they have been using CVS all these years; CVS was publically released in 1896, though I believe they may have alternatively used RCS and migrated to CVS somewhere down the line.
I don't think it was truly 'open', but you did get sources.
:)
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not many contractors really want to sign up for those government contracts. Sure they have big numbers associated with them, but there is usually so much paperwork associated with them that no one wants to deal with it. The companies that are willing to sign up for those contracts are few and far between. Since the playing field is so limited, it doesn't take many Microsoft Whores to tilt the buying decisions in that direction for a lot of government contract work. The Government just assumes that for its money all solutions will be equal, and that's not really the case.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
.. as in www.opencascade.org
I'm not enough of a KDE programmer to know what it would take to port this. I would really like to see something like this in a standard linux distribution along side other great programs like mozilla, open office, GIMP. ETC. (or Koffice, Konqueror, etc.)
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Yeah, because either everything the US does is bad or everything is good? You seem to imply it.
Do us all a favor: Grow up and add a few more dimensions to your thinking.
> Ohhh, and the necessary, BOO USA!!
You mean like the "BOO CHINA!" calls everytime something positive comes from China?
By Tim's logic we should be able to walk into the closest fed building and grabs some stationary. Cause, we paid for it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
It was only open to "friends" of the USA, though in practice almost anyone in the western world could get a copy, you just had snail-mail a request to the US army,they presumably checked you weren't totally evil (for values of evil equal to anti-US-military-industrial-complex), and gave you ftp access.
Not OSI-compliant open source until now though.
How much of this is GPL/legal to modify? I'm wondering when we'll be seeing forks from this, and/or integration of the physics or something into other FOSS software?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The point is that we didn't pay for the government to create acad software package for us. We paid them to protect and serve us. In fufilling that mission, they found it neccisary to create a cad package. As long as they are using it to serve us, our money is being well spent. The government has no obligation to give it back to us. It it really is a good they could have marketed it and sold it. The proceeds could be used to pay for other items they need and reduce the need for taxpayer contributions. Everyone would benifit, not just those with a specialised need for cad software. Just as we didn't pay for stationary suppies for a federal court house. We paid for a federal judicary system and in that proccess of providing ( or attempting to proivde as some would say) justice they needed stationary. Great. Money well spent and we need not expect them to turn over any of it as it serves the purpose for which we fund the agency. I understand there are a lot of people on slashdot that would disagree with me on this point, but the fact that they produced easily replicable software instead of a disposible good doesn't really make that much of a differnce in this regards. The point as I see it still stands, we should never expect gifts from the government.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yes, prior to this you had to be faxed a contract, sign it, fax it back, hope the intended recipient accepts it. Then after they did whatever they did, they'd give you a key to the encrypted source files. I know because I was discussing doing this with someone on the project but realized it wasn't worth the hassle.
Regards,
Steve
Think of a serious CAD package with things like Finite Element Analysis plugins. The rendering tool is just one of numerous plugins for this package.
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It seems silly for everyone to go through the hassle of compiling this every single time. Thanks.
I tried to get my hands on this application about 3 years ago. It was available for free download, but it required a password to run that the army would only give you after filling out several long and annoying forms. It's not a bad (not a great) CAD program that's available for many platforms including OS X.
Hm. BRL-CAD is a really good package, and it's always been very near the "open source" section of my mind, although it wasn't truly open source.
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.
The DoD's been using this little package for some time as their modeling and engineering tool for the Ballistics Resarch Lab that is attached to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. This is the bunch tasked with improving our armored vehicles and improving our ammo to trash our opponents' vehcicles much more easily. BRL-CAD is the tool that they use to accomplish the modeling and simulation portions of this task.
It's on a par with SolidWorks and ProE and it's battle proven as it were. Like most Government projects of this nature, the Government is prohibited by law from making money off of it, so they've been allowing people to use it for free and provide their own plugins for it. Now, it's under various Open Source licenses instead of the one they'd used previously. Those in the defense industry know a LOT about this little program and if they're not using it, it's only because they couldn't mod the source code and it didn't do quite what they needed of it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have BRLCAD installed here on a Sun workstation at home and I can tell you that it takes some getting used to as it's not very user friendly.
Like most powerful tools it's difficult to learn to use with effectiveness. That and the interface is more than a little clunky
I honestly prefer things like SolidWorks which while not as powerful is a hell of a lot easier to use.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
It's just that BRL-CAD's geared for high-speed events as well as low-speed events in it's FEA work.
SolidWorks and ProE might be able to deal with it barely since they do FEA and other stuff like BRL-CAD does...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The moderators have answered: you're not to think about it at all.
Is there a 2D or 3D equivalent used by architects for government buildings etc. i.e. something similar to AutoCAD?
Now it's on sourceforge. It's a truly free (as in speech) software that will stay on the net despite of the creators will.
Rethinking email
It really wasnt a big hassle to do that, just a simple fax... no real invasive questions....
In my case it took them about 3 days to accept my request..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought all US Government material was in the public domain.
The point is that we didn't pay for the government to create acad software package for us.
We did pay them to do that, as it was part of doing the job correctly. That is part of protect and serve. Think of it this way. My client does not pay me to customize their application to make it work the way they like. They pay me to migrate them to the new platform, it just so happens that part of that means customizing. So, do I do the install then turn around and say the custom work on the new package will be extra? Not in my world, that expense is built into the cost of doing the migration (or setting up plots, or mapping gas lines, or doing seismic research, or mapping flood zones ...). I know some do that kind of stuff, but we tend to wind up with their clients, so I am not worried about changing my practice of software written is part of services paid for.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
how does the fact that the government developed it suddenly make it 'public domain'?
the government develops millions of dollars in software a year and doesn't feel the need to release the code under ANY license, let alone public domain
You can't 'borrow' from the GPL btw, you either use GPL code in-house (legally) or you use GPL code and release that code along with your public releases. it's either one or the other.
either way, if the project 'borrowed' GPL code, no matter how much 'public funds' were directed into the project, the original code is still GPL and 100% enforceable as such. You can't make code public domain that was previously GPL without the specific permission of the original authors - and a complete re-release of the code under the new license.
Gekido's Lair
I just thought I'd mention OpenCascade
Very much underappreciated:
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why should it be public domain? Because, unless it's a security issue, pretty much ALL research is eventually made public domain, and somewhere there's a law concerning this.
Agreed on the GPL part, though.
very good idea, linux needs to come reagy with world class appz.
O.O.o. v2.0 will be ace
Gimp is rapidly becoming ace
why not a professional CAD program too?
CSG allows a completely different approach, more like programmer, that suits me far better. I'm currently 50% of the way through the download. Kewl.
On an unrelated note, I suspect the 280kB PNG on their home page is causing them loads of pain at the moment...
So when can I apt-get install BRL-CAD ?
...then they might start taking you seriously.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Here I was planning on snail-mailing in my password request.
So anyone who says the Govermnet isn't into reduction of paperwork AND lowering costs is just plain wrong!
Here's why:For the hard-of-thinking, it means that import-export to things like Pro/E is easy to add, even without source. With source, it becomes very easy (you can probably modify a nearby IO module rather than starting from scratch).
Adding I/O to SolidWorks for some of the many other formats BRL-CAD deals with may not be so easy. And BRL-CAD does a bunch of modelling which is beyond SolidWorks' scope, even with COSMOS bolted on.
As is running on Linux or a Mac or a 64-bit machine (you get a choice of Win2k-Pro/x86 or WinXP-Pro/x86 with the latest version; older versions will run on WinNT and Win98SE but they're bright enough to mark WinME as "not suitable for production use"). If they'd chosen a Unix ecosystem as a base, doing Win32 and Carbon/Aqua as derivatives would have been easy. Back-porting from Win32 is going to be such a pig that I can't see them ever doing it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A great description by one of the guys involved with the project.
Thanks for your informed feedback on this thread.
Where are my mod points when I need them.
Forex, it would be personally installed, and the chix assisting the installer would cause any of the males around to blunder into things. The dongle would have coloured status LEDs on it, and would also play Oggs, a selection of which would be included.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"We're here about our Intellectual Property rights" (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One of the complaints I hear most often about open source is the lack of powerful, free CAD software, and it's one of the few where the complaint is completely justified.
:-).
BRL-CAD is not your typical college student weekend project - this thing is INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH and used in the REAL WORLD for years and years. This news just made my day, and I hope to put an ebuild up soon, given how clean the make process has been thus far
This is a great way for open source to get high powered applications - older products that have the power but not necessarily the modern interfaces. Maxima and Axiom are two other examples of projects far beyond the scope of ordinary open source, that were originally developed in government/industry and then released to the world. Blender is still another.
So thanks to people giving some of the great but older applications new life again - it tremendously enriches the open source world and saves decades of coding by brilliant people!
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Compared with the Commonwealth forces, they generally suck on a man-for-man basis and only ever win on total firepower rather than skill or good tactics. There are specific exceptions to this, but in general the US wins by being the biggest gorilla on the field, not by being the smartest, fastest or most skilled.
There are also other forces (some isolated Europeans, forex) who rate at least as well as Commonwealth troops, and specials like the Ghurkas who on a man-for-man basis just ace any conventional military.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Go read Goerge Orwell's Animal Farm. All you really need to know about politics. High-falutin' principles that don't survive when the rubber meets the road are dangerous.
Put a greenie's house in the path of a devastating bushfire, then hand him/her a fuelled and sharpened chainsaw and stand back. Presently, you'll see whether (s)he's bright enough to understand that some principles don't scale.
I don't mean to imply that morality is entirely relative - that's another assertion doomed to fail under load - but you've got to pick your absolutes carefully, and stick by them. If you're a Liberal geek living in the USA, either change the country you're in, or change the country you're in, or change your beliefs. You are incompatible with your location.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Alas, this is pretty much stricly a 3D package. We've looked at adding 2D capabilities for years, but the cost/benefit ratio was never there. The principle function of the package has been and remains computational analysis of geometry.
Back when this package was first being developed, Mike Muuss had wanted to make it more open (as in Public Domain). The powers that be were uncomfortable with that at the time. Mike persuated them to adopt a license patterned after the BSD license of the time (when you had to show your AT&T license to get the BSD sources). Times and management changed, and the go-ahead to go OSS was won based upon the reduction of labor brought on by not processing those license agreements.
The old arragement has had its positive side. Budgets were won based upon the list of "licensees" for the software. Hopefully, this will now be offset by enhancements and contributions from the OSS community.
= 9J =
US Army + OSS = Good and Bad, apparently.
"You can't 'borrow' from the GPL btw, you either use GPL code in-house (legally) or you use GPL code and release that code along with your public releases. it's either one or the other."
No, no, no, he meant that the license appears to have borrowed from the GPL license, not that the code has borrowed from GPLed code. However, parts of the project use LPGL libraries such as libz and libpng.
-1 off-topic, -1 overrated, -1 troll, -1 flamebait, -1 not funny, -1 stupid, -1 I don't get it
thanks for the reply, now of course I'm curious to build BRLCAD and get into code and see if it's possible or sensible to have a way to transform and link geometric entities with an external "paperspace" section view that has all the drafting type entities in it. A couple decades ago in school I did some coursework of numerical methods for computational geometry with various splines and surfaces, will be fun to poke around in there if nothing else.
Cany anyone point me to build instructions for Windows platform? Thanks!
US Government cannot copyright anything, so it is in theory automatically in the public domain when the US Government publishes it.
The pieces that are GPL'd still will be GPL'd. It can't infect the rest of it.
I've recently had cause to investigate design tools to a degree that I had not previously.
My preference is open source. So imagine my dismay at finding that not just that the business world is held hostage to .doc, .xls, .ppt but that the design world is held hostage to .dwg .
I saw some hope in the Open Design Alliance, Open Cascade and some of the free CAD tools, but the range of secret but widely-used import and export formats that the commercial tools offer seem to make them an essential purchase for doing CAD work or development. That, in turn, is a barrier to entry to the development of free tools. Eg, the IGES standard, which is hard to find documented publicly, for free, seems to have more warts than a six ton toad because of decades of committee-added features.
The temptation to establish and own a standard is too high to resist given the return on investment that can be obtained.
I'm happy to see standard formats and commonly-used tools make their way to the free world so that vendors concentrate on true value-added products and services instead of milking windfalls of our IP-mad society.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Many 3D packages produce poor 2D drawings. While working with the model in the design phase is very helpful, when the project gets to the prefab shop or field construction phase many of the model's advantages go away.
This is usually because the fab/erection contractor cannot easily work with the model and keeping track of revisions can be a problem.
I'm referring to plant design projects that feature a lot of piping in case you missed my URL.
Great to see that the source is released, maybe we'll see an open-source 3D plant/piping design package running on Linux someday!
Paul
PS: Is BRL written for SMP? I'm pretty sure it must be.