This week was the surprising and unfortunate decision of [1]Siemens shutting down the OpenRadioss project as the four year old open-source project started by Altair Engineering with their prominent Radioss finite element solver. 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. Fortunately, there's a new community fork of OpenRadioss as OpenCourant.

Brian Clemens as the Founder and Vice President of Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) launched OpenCourant as a community fork of OpenRadioss. 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 describes itself on its new [2]OpenCourant.org project page as a community continuation of OpenRadioss:

"OpenCourant is an open-source finite element solver for crash, impact, and highly nonlinear dynamic simulation — carrying forward the OpenRadioss code base under the GNU AGPL, in the open, where it belongs."

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 [3]this discussion thread for anyone that happens to have recent OpenRadioss binaries.

Here's to hoping that OpenCourant is able to take off and continue on in the success where OpenRadioss left off. I look forward to using OpenCourant then in future benchmark articles.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Siemens-Ends-OpenRadioss

[2] https://opencourant.org/

[3] https://github.com/OpenCourant/OpenCourant/discussions/10