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."
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 really depends on what it is you are comparing. BRL-CAD is primarily a solid modeling system, with tools that span a very wide gamut. It is a very powerful system, but is definately not necessarily "super easy to use" any more so than UNIX is (take that however you may). Quite the contrary, many of the tools can be downright cryptic or counter-intuitive.
That said, the power of the system's expressiveness, the performance and fidelity of the ray-trace engine, it's ability to deal with massively complex geometries, and more distinguish it quite a distance from many of the commercial projects. Similarly from a developer's perspective, there's now immediate availability to the sourcecode and interaction with developers to make it into whaever is desired.
The package was never written to be a user-friendly modeler. It was written by computer scientists specifically for the needs of vulnerability and lethality analysts. The tools are very numerical and informative. Many were written in a UNIX-spirit where you can tie tools and inputs/outputs together to achieve some desired end. There is 1 primary graphical tool in BRL-CAD akin to what you'd use in SolidWorks (MGED). There are 400 other command-line tools that do even more.
Now with the project as open source, hopefully the community will step forward and help make it what they want it to be. The US Army has given the community a great heads start.
Cheers!
Sean
QCad
QCad is probably the closest thing to AutoCAD LT that you will find for Linux. It has a nice easy-to-use interface, seems mathematically correct, and is still under active development. Most Linux distros offer it as a binary package; i.e. apt-get install qcad or emerge qcad.
Other currently usable engineering type tools which you may or may not be aware of are:
What needs to happen is these tools should all be made to interact now. Draft your model in BRL-CAD (or Blender), run FEA on it using FElt, and then import views into QCad to dimension and plot out hardcopies. Some nice tight integration between these packages would be great.
Clickety Click
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.