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."
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.
Indeed it is running on Mac OS X. It's ran on OS X since the early Public Beta days -- the port took me much less time than it's taking me to write this comment.
BRL-CAD has a long history of running on many systems that range from your average desktop running Linux to Cray supercomputers fully taking advantage of the CPU resources on any of them. Support is presently actively maintained for Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris (*BSD usually just works). Support for Windows is there too, though it's only recently been a focus of development.
Some legacy platforms include the DEC VAX-11 running 4.3 BSD, DECStations running ULTRIX, SGI 4Ds running various versions of IRIX, Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS, the Cray 1, X-MP and Y-MP running UNICOS, the Cray 2, DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1, the Apple MAC II running A/UX, iPSC/860 Hypercube running NX/2, Alliant FX/8, Alliant FX/2800, Gould SEL, PowerNode, the Gould NP1, NeXT, HPPA 9000/700 running HPUX, the Ardent/Stardent, the Encore Multi-Max, and much more...
It's also been compiled on many versions of Linux, BSD, AIX, IRIX, Solaris over the years. Keep in mind just how old the project has been actively maintained. Two decades of supporting the latest and greatest is a lot of varied hardware and operating systems.
Cheers!
Sean