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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."
Is it me or are the screenshots showing this puppy running on Mac OSX?
It's the "if it's cheap, it must not be good" mentality that really does apply to CAD software...
All it takes is one company to challenge that. If it saves them money it becomes a competitive advantage, and other companies will either jump on the bandwagon, develop something better, or die off.
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.
No mention of GPL, though portions of it borrowed from GPL. For those of us who've been writing DOD software for decades, it's always been available for public use (unless classified for some reason). This entire package now brings into view an interesting question. If the software was developed using public funds and is therefor in the public domain, how can the GPL still apply?
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.
If this is the package I'm thinking of that my old customers at the Naval Research Lab used, it's handled IGES forever.. At least since the late 80's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I see it can't export to pro/e so thats not very good.
Yeah, cheap CAD Doesn't tend to mean much, also you are only as good as your file support.
AutoCAD doesn't belong here, it's not a solid modeler, yeah they are trying to extend it, but thats just a level of evil on top of the already evil that is auto cad.
Solidworks is one you left out, and they did change things, they came out with a CAD program for 5 grand that was up there with Pro E, but they tossed a lot of features that most never need, and ditched multi-platform which tends to be overrated for something like this. And do to this and their sudden eating of PTCs market PTC cut the price on pro/e 2001 and wildfire to 5 grand. So things are changing some. 33 Grand for one seat of a CAD program has finally become a thing of the past.
The FOSS community has made shit for inroads (Unix and the like have been around for 40 years and they don't have a decent share of the desktop environment YET, maybe in another 40 years), but if it suits your ego to think so, go for it.
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?
"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."
You're assuming that the community would accept such an ally. Consider the outcry you hear every time when this group of "father rapers" turns out to be using a piece of FOSS software. "We should modify the license to specifically ban the military from using our app!"
And the site you linked to (gocc.gov) is running Plone, one of the best open source content management systems out there, IMHO.