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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."

1 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The army putting a foot on our side = good by TheKidWho · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I can see it now. This is just an excuse to raid everysingle CAD software producer with US Army Rangers and put them all out of business for violating the GPL. Thereby making BRL-CAD the only remaining CAD software in the world!

    "Those Terrorists violated the GPL! We must purge them!"