OpenCourant: Community Revives OpenRadioss After Siemens Pulls the Plug

This week Siemens made the surprising move of shutting down OpenRadioss, a four-year-old open-source finite element solver. The project began at Altair Engineering, built around their well-known Radioss package, and had gathered a community of its own. Siemens didn't merely wind the project down: it closed the GitHub repository hosting the source code and removed the resources that had grown up around it.

The story didn't end there, though. A community fork has appeared under the name OpenCourant.

Who picked it up

The effort is led by Brian Clemens, founder and vice president of Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF). OpenCourant is based on the last publicly known open-source snapshot of OpenRadioss taken before Siemens cut off access to the Git repository. The project will be run under the RESF and keeps the original GNU AGPLv3 licensing.

On its new OpenCourant.org page the project describes itself as a community continuation of OpenRadioss: an open-source finite element solver for crash, impact, and highly nonlinear dynamic simulation, carrying the OpenRadioss code base forward under the GNU AGPL and in the open, "where it belongs."

One snag

The handover wasn't entirely smooth. Part of OpenRadioss consisted of binary dependencies, and the fork lacks the very latest versions of them — the ones that existed just before the repository was removed. The developers have opened a discussion thread looking for anyone who happens to have kept recent OpenRadioss binaries.

Here's hoping OpenCourant takes off and carries on where OpenRadioss left off. Phoronix, for one, is already looking forward to putting the solver back into future benchmark articles.

Source: Phoronix