About "Open CASCADE Technology: Ten Years in Open Source"

Excellent thread Thomas!

(Although I don’t remember by heart if it was December 9th, 1999 or some other day – I found traces of announcement dated since Dec 7. Perhaps publication was on Dec 20, 1999. Anyway, congratulations to the development team and entire community with 10 years anniversary of Open CASCADE).

My suggestions:

1. Community support and online presence:
a. Better infrastructure: forum with ease of uploading files, images, etc; patch repository
b. Say what you are working on, describe your problems, perhaps you will gather some ideas and feedback on how to do it better
c. Some development contests and so forth (there are plenty of ideas how other companies manage their development communities)
2. More regular community releases:
a. Maintenance releases and/or
b. Source code snapshots (i.e. avoiding overhead of releases – packaging, installation, validation, documentation, marketing collateral, etc)
3. Beta releases or some previews gathering community feedback before production releases (can be achieved via 2b).
4. Keep focused on fundamental algorithms quality: both from correctness and performance perspective.
5. New features released with some reasonable information – documentation, samples, forum or blog posts describing their use and so forth
6. License: adoption of LGPL or another recognized one
7. Better Tutorial to help people start up faster – this still remains a challenge

Roman

Dear all,

I completely agree with Thomas on all his points. So yes, as a (wannabee) user I would really like to thank the OpenCascade team for bringing the excellent framework to the open source table.

As a comment to the points raised by Thomas, the 2 most important ones for me (and our company) are a public repository and a bug-tracker. Additionally a wiki page would be nice. In particular for the topics that are addressed often in the forum (building, topological operations etc.)

It would be nice if one of the members of the OpenCascade team would take some time to post their viewpoint on this topic.

Regards,

Marco

Based on the wayback internet archive, the first distribution went public on december 20th 1999 !

Below are some links from 10 years ago that can be interestign even today !

www. opencascade. org
http://web.archive.org/web/20000520003456/http://www.opencascade.org/

www. opencascade. com
http://web.archive.org/web/20000302152135/http://www.opencascade.com/

In general using the wayback you can find lots of info also in other dates ,and some forgotten downloads also.

Fotis

Hello Community,

As it seems not everybody is subscribed to our news, here is the link to the original message published in "News" section on our web site: http://www.opencascade.org/about/news/issue148/.

We appreciate all your inputs and we shall prepare our reply to your requests and suggestions for sure.

Best regards,
Forum supervisor

Hello all,

What Thomas said - thanks to the OpenCascade team. This really is an important package in the open source world, thanks all for releasing it.

As for suggestions, two points are important to me:

1) Online bug-tracker, to centralise discussion about what's broken and what's fixed
(fixes can be hard to spot in the forum)

2) License clarification. I think the spirit of the OCC license and the GPL (or similar) are almost identical. However, those tiny little differences stop major Linux distros from packaging OpenCascade and including it in the repos. That's a great shame - building is still difficult. I think standard packages would increase the number of users significantly.

Again, this is a neat (and huge) library - I hope it continues to receive the recognition it deserves. Here's to the next ten years!

Arthur