Army has been developing a GPL'd CAD package since 1979: BRL-CAD | Hacker News Reader

Army has been developing a GPL'd CAD package since 1979: BRL-CAD

brlcad.org

13 pointsniels_olson8 comments

Can't believe I'm submitting this to you guys three days after GSoC applications closed.

The main developer of BRL-CAD also works on BZFlag, or at least he did back when I was contributing to the project. You can usually find him on Freenode as brlcad.

For the longest time BRL was "open source". But you had to be an american citizen and in the inner circle of govt contractors/employee's. A lot of paperwork was involved. Nice to see it's really real open source now.

Downloading now. Wonder if it still has the horrid text based interface.

edit: the interface isn't as bad as I thought at first. Do need to spend time getting used to it though. It's not as sexy out-of-the-box as AutoCAD, but the underlying geometric method gives me hope for long term performance. I hope the Google Summer of Code project makes some headway on interface. I definitely don't want to see more "GUIs are for the weak", a la the R project.

At one point I remember having every form of input device I could find hooked up to AutoCad when working as a plans architect (high class draftsman/flunky) A huge GTECO digitizer, two touch/membrane keypads, The IBM keyboard (one with twice as many function keys...) a mouse and a trackball and I still wanted more! Sigh...

Ha! I remember having an encrypted copy of this on a CD set I had when I was a teenager. I sent away for the license key to decrypt it. It was free, but they had to check that I was a citizen and not dangerous. Somehow I still remember the key too, if anybody has that old file and a copy of crypt(3).

Of course, I played with it for about 15 minutes before giving up.

If the US Army developed it with our tax dollars, isn't it in the public domain?

They can claim national security if they wanted to.

If you really want to work on an awesome government program that was released to the public domain, OpenVISTA could use your help: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista There's not higher calling than helping people live healthier and saving some lives.

yes, you could get it under the Freedom of Information Act, which is how the VistA developers got their code out from under the VA. Think of the GPL as a "dual license" scenario. Technically, "public domain" in this context, I believe, was intended to refer to American citizens. The internet and the modern software licenses obviously impose a broader philosophical outlook.

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