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U.S. Army Research Lab Opens BRL-CAD Source

Posted by timothy on from the not-like-the-public-paid-for-it-or-anything dept.

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."

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The army putting a foot on our side = good by aixou · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think it'd be better if the Air Force was on our side. Just call up someone high on the inside " We're gonna need an unmanned airstrike at 122.125 west 47.681 north. Yeah, it's Fallujah."

  2. Re:CVS repository goes back 17 years!! by andreMA · · Score: 5, Funny
    CVS was publically released in 1896
    I hesitate to ask what it ran on...