- Open CASCADE Technology
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Open CASCADE Technology 
Developer(s) OPEN CASCADE S.A.S Initial release 1999 Stable release 6.5.1 / June 16, 2011[1] Written in C++ Operating system Linux and Windows Type CAD, CAM, CAE License Open CASCADE Technology Public License Website www.opencascade.org Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) is a software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, etc. that is developed and supported by OPEN CASCADE SAS. It is available under the "Open CASCADE Technology Public License" which the developer claims to be "LGPL-like with certain differences". Despite this claim, it is not listed as compatible with the GPL license by the publisher of the LGPL, the Free Software Foundation.[2] The Debian project considers the license to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines and has accepted Open CASCADE into its main archive [3] after some debate [4].
In March 2011, the wording of the license was subtly changed. From then on, contributors are no more inclined but now advised to send their modifications of the source code back to Open CASCADE S.A.S.[5]
Contents
History
CAS.CADE (abbreviated from Computer Aided Software for Computer Aided Design and Engineering) was originally developed in the early 90s by Matra Datavision, editor of Euclid CAD software as the underlying infrastructure for its future version Euclid Quantum.
However, in 1998 the company abandoned software development to concentrate on services, and most of the software development facilities were sold to Dassault Systemes, editor of competing CATIA. Next year Matra Datavision decided to publish its CAS.CADE infrastructure under an Open Source model and renamed it Open CASCADE[6].
In 2000 a separate company OPEN CASCADE SAS was created to make business around Open CASCADE[7]. OPEN CASCADE SAS was sold in 2003 to Principia, a French Service Provider corporation, and then in 2006 it was acquired by Euriware Group, a subsidiary of AREVA.
In 2004, software was renamed to Open CASCADE Technology (abbreviated as OCCT) in order to distinguish it from the name of the company itself.
Object Libraries
- Foundation Classes
- Modeling Data
- Modeling Algorithms
- Visualization
- Application Framework
- Data Exchange
- DRAW
Workshop Organization Kit (WOK)
WOK (Workshop Organization Kit) is Open CASCADE development environment, which has been designed to allow a large number of developers to work on a product getting advantage of common reference version shared over the local network. Though being rather obsolete, it is still in use in some legacy environments, and in particular is used for production of certified versions of OCCT.
WOK is de-facto a necessity for making substantial changes in OCCT since it is the only tool that provides support for CDL (CAS.CADE definition language), used for declaration of most of OCCT classes and also serving to define logical structure of OCCT libraries. WOK has been included in previous OCCT distributions; since OCCT version 6.4 it is made an independent tool.
Releases
Open CASCADE S.A.S. provides a public version of the library, which is released sporadically[8]. For example, version 6.3.0 was publicly released in 2008. The next public version was 6.5.0, which was released in early 2011. There are more frequent (maintenance) releases for customers of Open CASCADE S.A.S. All releases are said to become publicly available starting from version 6.5.1[9].
version release date release type public release 6.5.1 16 June 2011 maintenance yes 6.5 5 March 2011 minor yes 6.4.2 18 February 2011 maintenance no 6.4.1 7 February 2011 maintenance no 6.4 1 October 2010 minor no 6.3.1 19 June 2009 maintenance no 6.3 3 September 2008 minor yes 6.2.1 6 December 2007 maintenance no 6.2 19 March 2007 minor yes 6.1.1 16 October 2006 maintenance no 6.1 24 March 2006 minor yes 5.2.4 29 July 2005 maintenance no 5.2.3 6 May 2005 maintenance no 5.2.2 24 December 2004 maintenance no 5.2.1 29 October 2004 maintenance no 5.2 16 July 2004 minor yes 5.1.3 23 April 2004 maintenance no 5.1.2 1 March 2004 maintenance no 5.1.1 2 December 2003 maintenance no 5.1 10 October 2003 minor yes 5.0.2 1 August 2003 maintenance no 5.0.1 6 June 2003 maintenance no 5.0 23 May 2003 major yes Open CASCADE Community Edition
In March 2011, Thomas Paviot initiated a fork of the then most recent publicly available version 6.5.0 of Open CASCADE library. The initiative is called Open CASCADE Community Edition. The project aims to establish a separate community-based release and bug-report process for the library.[10]
External links
- Open CASCADE Technology Homepage
- Discussion of Open CASCADE license on Open CASCADE forums (started 25th Feb '09)
- Github repository of the OCE project
- Discussion forum for the OCE project
- Python binding to Open CASCADE library
References
- ^ Open CASCADE Technology 6.5.1 is available for download!
- ^ List of FSF approved software licenses
- ^ Open CASCADE package for Debian GNU/Linux
- ^ debian-legal thread on the Open CASCADE license
- ^ Forum thread in official Open CASCADE forum discussing the change of license wording
- ^ Downloading Of Source Code For Open Cascade Gains Momentum
- ^ European e-Business Market Watch Case Study: Open source-based services by Open CASCADE S.A.
- ^ Official release list for Open CASCADE
- ^ Becoming more and more open!
- ^ Forum thread in official Open CASCADE forum announcing Open CASCADE Community Edition project
Categories:- Free computer-aided design software
- Free software programmed in C++
- Linux computer-aided design software
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