[rescue] BRL-CAD, anyone?

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 09:18:58AM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > Has anyone used BRL-CAD recently?  It seems to support NURBS, Surface
> > modeling, and CSG Solids.  I'm going to fax over my de-crypt request
> > today, but was wondering if anyone has ever used it, and what their
> > thoughts are.
> >
> > URL:
> > http://ftp.arl.army.mil/brlcad
>
> I really am unhappy with the licensing of it.
>
> It does stuff that is theoretically easy to program ones self.  Of
> course, the trick as always is making a decent UI to go with the maths
> and geometries.  Since this is supposedly used for real work, one
> would expect that UI to be good.
>
> Generally, I'm frustrated at the level of difficulty involved in
> getting a hold of BRL-Cad, the visible human dataset, and the USGS
> datasets.  There is all sorts of paper work and they charge simply
> unbelievable media fees, and puts limits on what can be done with it.
> What happened to government create IP being public domain?

What sort of difficulties have you had?  I submitted a license request for
it in 1995, and got a return fax describing how to download it by FTP in
about 2 days.

I used it for about 2 years until I switched over to SDRC IDEAS.  BRL-CADs
weaknesses are in the UI and documentation.  Both are like Unix, they make
sense once you understand them but take some time to wrap your head
around.  I have not followed development since, it may have evolved a lot
in the last 5 years.

I don't mind most of the license encumberences given that the source code
is available.

-James