CGAL and OCC

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GreyhoundZero
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CGAL and OCC

Post by GreyhoundZero »

Why did the FreeCAD developers choose to use of OpenCascade as the base of FreeCAD? Does it have advantages over the more popular(?) library CGAL? (And other possibly related libraries, like OpenSceneGraph?)
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kwahoo
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Re: CGAL and OCC

Post by kwahoo »

CGAL is a mesh/triangle based solution, isn't it? If true, then it is useless for high precision CAD applications.
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shoogen
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Re: CGAL and OCC

Post by shoogen »

EDIT: CGAL is GPLed. Linking against it would apply the restrictions of the GPL on FreeCAD.
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wmayer
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Re: CGAL and OCC

Post by wmayer »

shoogen wrote:CGAL is GPLed and therefore not LGPL compatible.
GPL in general is not incompatible to LGPL. See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.htm ... patibility

But the point is that in the past CGAL was licensed under LGPL and QPL and the latter is known to be incompatible to the GPL. In the past FreeCAD linked against a GPL library and thus it was impossible to use CGAL. Now FreeCAD is completely GPL-free and this we absolutely want to keep for the future and thus CGAL isn't an option at all.
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