[rescue] BRL-CAD, anyone?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 08:10:16AM -0700, James Lockwood wrote:
> 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.

Well, I have to fill out paper work in all three cases.  For the USGS
I have to pay a lot of money.  For the NIH, I can download it, but if
I want in on some other medium, I have to pay a lot of money.  For the
NIH I have to fill out long justification forms and agree to let them
use my work in promoting themselves.  And they don't want to give it
to me to duplicate the work of others, especially if the work of
others is for sale (like poly models from Visible Productions) [1].  Oh,
and did I mention the lengthy paper work for all three?

Why in the world should this be anything other than just going and
downloading it without any other hassle.
 
> 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.

Isn't SDRC IDEAS really expensive?
 
> I don't mind most of the license encumberences given that the source code
> is available.

Generally I wouldn't object so much to a license similar to that, if
it wasn't for the fact that it is developed by the federal government
with my tax dollars.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd

[1] I keep trying to convince my advisor that a copy of the visible
human data set would make his research somewhat easier, but have been
unable to convince him of that yet.  Having it would mean no more
having to guess from bad pictures where things go, and no more having
to search the net for decent models of organs.