After Siemens Re-Licenses OpenRadioss, Rocky Linux Announces Open-Source Fork

- In 2022 Altair Engineering open sourced "OpenRadioss", an industry-leading finite element solver under the GNU AGPL License, reports Phoronix.

- Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year

- Siemens closes access to OpenRadioss.

"Siemens didn't just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it," writes Phoronix, before announcing a new open-source community fork: Radioss has been an industry-leading solver for analyzing crashes, blasts, and other purposes. Altair creating OpenRadioss was a huge milestone for the technical computing industry. It also had other effects like for myself in finally being able to benchmark with this (Open)Radioss code for CPU performance testing compared to the expensive licensing on Radioss itself...

Siemens argues the OpenRadioss closure is for consolidating efforts:

"After four years of successful community-driven research, Siemens is entering a new chapter for the Radioss solver. To accelerate innovation and provide the robust support our global users require for production-grade simulation, we are consolidating our efforts."
It was Brian Clemens. founder/VP Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation who launched the community fork of OpenRadioss — to be called OpenCourant. Its web site announces they'll be "carrying forward the OpenRadioss code base under the GNU AGPL, in the open, where it belongs."

Phoronix writes in a follow-up: OpenCourant is based on the last publicly known open-source OpenRadioss snapshot before Siemens shut it down and removed access to the Git repository... OpenCourant continues with the OpenRadioss GNI AGPLv3 licensing and will be run as part of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. They have run into a small issue though with part of OpenRadioss consisting of binary dependencies and not having the very latest versions prior to Siemens' removal of the repository. Details on that via this discussion thread for anyone that happens to have recent OpenRadioss binaries.
In other open source news, Kagi is ending their development work on the Orion Browser for Linux and Windows, reports the site Linuxiac — but Kagi "plans to open-source both versions so other developers or organizations can keep them going."

Corpospeak...

[Knightman]

To accelerate innovation and provide the robust support our global users require for production-grade simulation, we are consolidating our efforts.

Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.

Re:

[Sique]

Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.

Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.

Re:

[Knightman]

I looked up the press releases Siemens put out when they bought Altair for $10 billion, and who would have guessed, it's part of their AI-push:

Addition of Altair technology to the Siemens Xcelerator open digital business platform will create the world's most complete AI-powered portfolio of industrial software and further enhance the most comprehensive Digital Twin

Re:Corpospeak...

[Archangel Michael]

"We at Siemens have seen how successful SCO was, and think we can be just as successful!"

Re:

[FirstNoel]

now that's a throwback!

Re:

[Archangel Michael]

Yeah, I've become the old greybeard I used to make fun of. The Tech version of a hero living long enough to become the villain.

Now, get off my lawn! ;-)

Hostile forks ftw

[sg_oneill]

I had an idea a while back of launching an org called "Hostile Fork" that basically gets these hostile de-FOSSings and relaunches them from the last known FOSS commit, stripping out all the anti user shit (user limits for "community" versions etc), de-branding them and trying to find new maintainers. This was in response to almost every non relational database I used succumbing to management bullshit and going closed source, or using the GPL as shareware by locking important functions behind "license checks" (motherfuckers if you put that license check in GPL code I *am* entitled to remove it). Im still bitter about ArangoDB

In the end, I have neither the time resources to put into it, or the money/legal resources to defend it. But I still think it'd be a great idea.

What about the open source contributions to date?

[mccalli]

If it were open source and someone cared enough to fork it, then presumably there are open licensed contribution to the repo that Siemens won't own the copyright to.

What happens to those? Can they be taken closed source at all?

Re:

[Asteconn]

Depends if they ever accepted any merge requests, I guess.

The cynic in me suggests this might be the primary motivation for them completely deleting the repo.

Re:

[Himmy32]

*Accepted any merge requests by a contributor who didn't sign the CLA.

Re:What about the open source contributions to dat

[Entrope]

It depends on how the contributions were licensed. A lot of projects require either copyright grants to the project steward (for example, the FSF) or explicit permission for the steward to distribute the code under some other license. Occasionally there are good reasons to relicense code, like the transitions across GPL versions, but this is the obvious risk of giving those permissions.

Re:

[Sique]

If Siemens does not re-distribute them, then Siemens does not violate any copyrights on them. Only if Siemens would continue to distribute binaries of OpenRadiuss to customers, they would be in violation.

Re: What about the open source contributions to da

[drinkypoo]

It's AGPL, not just GPL

Re:

[Sique]

Does not matter in this case, if they don't host an online version of it. My impression is that Siemens wants to shut down the project completely.

Re:

[Creepy]

If they want to use it, they kind of have to. AGPL infects all of your products source code for every project that uses it. You either need to relicense it under a more restrictive license or basically release all of your source code for every product you own. Siemens is a for profit company, they will do that vs what Stalin... er, I mean Stallman wants.

I really have no skin in this game right now, but I've seen what highly infectious licenses can do when you're putting in thousands of hours coding a commer

Re:

[Himmy32]

open licensed contribution to the repo that Siemens won't own the copyright to.

This is why Contributor License Agreements make most uses of AGPL be against the spirit of FOSS, because they usually allow the code to be relicensed. So AGPL is the millstone around the neck to prevent community forks or uses by competitors. Commercial organizations with actual resources to pick up the burden of maintenance won't want to get anywhere near the project with such a restrictive license.

So the most "Libre" of licenses is the most prominent enabler of commercial owners of projects to steal commu

FSF maybe ?

[AncalagonTotof]

Isn't this a case for the FSF ? Closing the GitHub repo is probably against some OSS licenses, and then, illegal, right ?

Re:

[karmawarrior]

If they're the copyright holder, they can, legally, do whatever they want. And closing the Github repo isn't against any OSS license I'm aware of: they may, depending on whether they've accepted contributions without copyright assignment, be required to provide the source code to those who have obtained binaries from them directly, but that's about the extent of it. I don't know if their Github had binary releases, but assuming it didn't, nobody really has a legal case against them.

The best that can happen

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Closing the GitHub repo is probably against some OSS licenses, and then, illegal, right ?

The code is AGPL'd. If they don't have another mechanism for distributing the code to anyone entitled to receive it then kinda: closing the repo isn't illegal, but not observing the license is unlawful, and grounds for legal action.

Re:

[Himmy32]

The code that they released as AGPL, but the CLA means that they own the copyright and can assign any license they please. So they can rerelease that code with any license they want.

So observing the license and threat of legal action is for all the other suckers that gave them free code.

Re:

[Himmy32]

The FSF is in favor of Contributor License Agreements that assign copyright. For example, in the GNU C Compiler contributing section:

The FSF prefers that a contributor files a copyright assignment for large contributions.

CLAs that allow commercial entities to relicense and get sole full commercial use while burdening the community and competitors with a license so restrictive that it kills off forks is the monster of their creation.

Radios?

[TechyImmigrant]

II had not heared of that program. erroneously thought that a program so named would have something to do with radios.

I've released some radio related things on github.

Necfull: Because NEC the antenna element solver from the Us governement costs money. This is better and free.
YagiYagi: A much quicker antenna design program with pre-baked antenna models for common antenna types.
Morsey: To learn Morse code with several different learning models (because I learned some things from my wife with the education Ph

Re:

[dougmc]

Looks like the "radi" part of the name came from "radiation", as in "blast waves and other high-energy events radiate", and "oss" came from "ossature", the French word for framework, skeleton, or structure.

Not really much to do with ham radio.

Puttin the cat back in the bag?

[BrendaEM]

Worked out pretty well for WhOracle and OpenOffice, didn't it? LOL!