Re[2]: emc really needs a copyleft cad/cam package

["Terry L. Ridder" <terrylr-at-blauedonau.com>]

hello;

i have sent an e-mail off to rms (richard stallman)
asking for some guidance here. i received a short
note back that he would like at the situation i had
outlined.

i have read opencascade.com license and that was
one of the questions i asked rms.

the crux of the matter is emc is not copyrighted,
it is public domain.

gnu gpled and public domain can "mingle" no problem.
it is when we start getting into the other "opensource"
licenses that things become infinite shades of gray.

the confusing part in all of this is why brl-cad
has the license it does, since it was also written
by u.s. goverment employees. my gut feeling is
because it is the military.

brl-cad stands for (ballistic research laboratory - cad).
there would definitely be a problem with international
usage.

there is also the point ray brought up concerning the 
human machine interface (hmi) that nist has already published.
so we really need to look at staying within the guidelines
of the hmi. i personally would go with corba instead of com.

com == component object model
corba == common object request broker architecture.

qcad is strictly 2d, we really need 2d & 3d cad/cam.

xfig, imho, is much better than qcad but here again it
is strictly 2d. there are ways around this but they definitely
are not user-friendly or for that matter programmer-friendly.

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Jeff Barlow wrote:

jeff> Terry,
jeff> 
jeff> Did you look at http://www.opencascade.com/ ? It's just the guts,
jeff> there's no GUI that I could find. The license looks GPL-ish but I didn't
jeff> study it in detail, not sure if it would be "RMS approved". Getting from
jeff> it's internal data structures to G-code might be a rather daunting task,
jeff> though.
jeff> 
jeff> Q-Cad is a nice little open source 2D package. The user interface
jeff> reminds me of Drafix (Hi, Anne), which I like a lot better than Autocad.
jeff> There is a CAM add-on for it to generate G-code, but it's not open
jeff> source. See: http://www.qcad.org/index.php3?body=main&product=qcad 
jeff> 
jeff> And speaking of Autocad, there's always Intellicad:
jeff> http://www.intellicad.org/index.htm I can't say I like it, but it mostly
jeff> works, and there is a lot of working code available there.
jeff> 
jeff> Jeff
jeff> 

-- 
Terry L. Ridder
Blue Danube Software (Blaue Donau Software)
"We do not write software, we compose it."

digging deep, i feel my conscience burn
i need to know who and what i am
this hunger jolts me from complacency
rocks me, makes me meet myself
----kendall payne---closer to myself---