Open CASCADE geometry kernel license issue

[Charles Collis]

Open Cascade is a very capable open-source geometry kernel, useful for all manner of engineering software, including full-blown CAD - and could have far-reaching benefits for open manufacturing in the future if properly harnessed (see http://www.opencascade.org/showroom/demos). However they use a home-grown open-source license which is causing problems and confusion for developers and is also limiting the amount of useful improvements they get back from the community. There are also ambiguities about its GPL compatibility.

There is a thread on their forum where this is being discussed and includes responses from Fedora / Red Hat legal.

Roman Lygin, a former Open Cascade project manager, now at Intel, is asking for people to speak up to help estimate the importance of this issue. So if anyone wants to add their (constructive) voice to try and help persuade Open CASCADE to make the transtition to a mainstream open source license (ideally LGPL), then the more the merrier...

Charles.

[Charles Collis]

I cleverly left off the vital link to the forum thread!

http://www.opencascade.org/org/forum/thread_15859

Charles.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:48 AM, Charles Collis wrote:
> Roman Lygin, a former Open Cascade project manager, now at Intel, is asking
> for people to speak up to help estimate the importance of this issue. So if
> anyone wants to add their (constructive) voice to try and help persuade Open
> CASCADE to make the transtition to a mainstream open source license (ideally
> LGPL), then the more the merrier...

How is this going? Any update? I just ran across this-

http://www.pythonocc.org/ a way to interface python to OpenCASCADE,
which makes it really nice for interactive fully script-driven CADing.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507