

Army has been developing a GPL'd CAD package since 1979: BRL-CAD - niels_olson
http://brlcad.org/
Can't believe I'm submitting this to you guys three days <i>after</i> GSoC applications closed.
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sgk284
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.

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spitfire
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.

~~~
niels_olson
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.

~~~
hsmyers
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...

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mullr
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.

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

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sachinag
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.

