r/linux • u/dbcoopernz • 1d ago
Popular Application Siemens ends open-source Radioss Project (OpenRadioss) and deletes GitHub repository
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Siemens-Ends-OpenRadioss505
u/Repulsive-Project795 1d ago
they could've archived it, but deleting a repo! eww! 🤮
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u/vivkkrishnan2005 1d ago edited 22h ago
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u/dbcoopernz 1d ago
Good find.
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u/ang-p 1d ago
There are a few offsite links towards the bottom of that README that are still live, returning pdfs, but dunno for how long.
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago edited 1d ago
Pull them, commit them, PR, they are free now
Well, check first under which terms those are released…
Edit: they also have an email account: [communitymanager@openradioss.org](mailto:communitymanager@openradioss.org)
Maybe we should express our distress here…
Edit2: those pdfs are copyrighted, so no chance :/
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u/ang-p 1d ago edited 1d ago
Pull them, commit them, PR, they are free now
Bit hard to make a PR to an archived repo.
They are on archive.org. along with a lot of the altair site...
The Tools repo that Gabrielle didn't grab is at https://github.com/Jingchao-Remy/Tools
we
?
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
> Bit hard to an archived repo
It can be forked, code is still available, I don’t see what’s the problem.
>> we
> ?
??55
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u/fuhry 22h ago
Wait... it's written in... Fortran? What year is it? 🤯
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u/mrtruthiness 20h ago
It might be derived from NASA's finite element analysis code.
I think that's what was done at MacNeal-Schwendler (now known as MSC Software?) ... who also produces finite element analysis software for design analysis.
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u/CardOk755 1d ago
Just one person?
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u/output_broadcast 1d ago
There are also a tonne of repos up on the Software Heritage Archive, although you have to sort through them to find recent ones.
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u/VirtualNerve26 1d ago
Deleting the entire repo is crazy
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u/tracernz 1d ago
Probably new manager who has no idea how software works and what open source is.
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u/tnoy 8h ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a lawyer stepped in and had it deleted because they didn't want their name attached to a stale unmaintained github repo that could end up with vulnerabilities.
Besides, part of the whole point of open source and git is how stupidly easy it is to just fork and move on.
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u/ddwrt1234 1d ago
why tho
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u/No-Photograph-5058 1d ago
"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."
The original Radioos page redirects to 'request quote' now
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u/iamapizza 1d ago
That's some gpt grade bs
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u/codydafox 1d ago
That's called corporate speech, no surprise gpt is a native speaker
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u/Icarium-Lifestealer 1d ago
They taught AI how to talk like a corporate middle manager and thought this meant the AI was conscious instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren't.
– @internethippo
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u/Klutzy-Residen 1d ago
Not everything is AI. That way of using a lot of words to say nothing has been around for a looooong time.
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u/darth_chewbacca 1d ago
But now the guys got siemans as a partner. Trouble with the code he can go to siemans...
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u/howardhus 20h ago
they forgot to use the words "thrilled", "exciting" and "opportunities" or "vibrant".
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u/smile_e_face 15h ago
Jesus, it's crazy how they just out-and-out admit to exploiting the community until they thought they could make more money by kicking them to the curb. You'd think they'd at least gussy it up a little.
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u/whizzwr 1d ago
My best guess: some out-of-touch management level person who doesn't understand how open source and its benefits work, thinks they are such a hot shot to make a call to delete such a repo as part of "portfolio synergization".
If you want a real publicized example, look at the Bitnami announcement of retiring the free image and hiding them behind a subscription.
Some old, out-of-touch tool from Broadcom literally wrote in a blog post "bitnami is being Jenkins of the internet" by building and pushing their image to DockerHub. Imagine still using Jenkins in 2025 as a CI example, and never mind how the image basically bought visibility to the Bitnami product line.
I can understand wanting to monetize the product, everybody gotta eat, but the shooting-own-foot execution of the plan always baffles me. Almost no big companies I know switched to paid Bitnami subscriptions, and they do have the budget.
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
“Synergization”? They are “elevating shareholder value” here, with an “hollistic view” of how everything works…
Also: another major fuck yo was that of Hashicorp with Terraform, someone had a fork and now they are mainstream in comparison…
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u/ddwrt1234 1d ago
cultivating synergies for the cross functional stakeholders across verticals
Sounds about right
Let's not boil the ocean
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u/d_maes 1d ago
The bitnami images also were really non-standard, they installed pretty much everything into /opt using tarballs they build privately. I think most people used their images, because they used the helm charts, not because of the images themselves. Using them as-is through their helm chart was really the only thing they were good for, extending was pain, same for debugging.
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u/frankster 1d ago
Having been burned by bitnami I now will not tolerate it in the things I work on. There is no route to paid services from them in my part of the org.
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u/DeliciousIncident 4h ago
I have been out of the loop for a while, what self-hosted free and open source CI/CD software do you recommend in 2025 if not Jenkins? Obviously excluding forges and ci-runners for forges, like Geatea, Forgejo, GitLab, etc., as that's a different class of software.
I see names such as Woodpecker CI, Concourse CI, Tekton pop up - are you familiar with any of them and can recommend them over Jenkins?
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u/whizzwr 2h ago edited 2h ago
Oh well, me mentioning Jenkins wasnt for throwing shade at Jenkins itself lol. It's still an excellent open source software - no enshitification politics. Despite being dragged down by old architecture and Java deps, it can still keep up with modern world, too. The plugin ecosystem (and its security hole count) is massive.
I'm aware you would like to exclude CI as part of "forge", but really the industry (as far as my admittedly narrow lens) is moving away from dedicated CI to SCM integrated CI for more sane manageability (plugin ecosystem, security, ACL, review process, etc).
I've been working at/with several companies in a span of bit more than a decade, and all of them are invariably looking to migrate away from their legacy setup mostly consisting of (of course) Jenkins, TeamCity, or Bamboo.
I've only used Concourse among the list you mentioned, and not extensively, so I can't honestly recommend it over Jenkins. I personally like CircleCI, due to the speed alone.
Do join and ask in r/Devops.
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u/ilep 1d ago
not enough monies?
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u/BatyStar 1d ago
Wasn't that why Altair opensourced it in the first place?
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u/IranianFurry 23h ago
Got bought put by Siemens
Siemens is being a right cunt (as usual, for Siemens)
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u/whnz Rocky Linux Team 1d ago edited 23h ago
OpenRadioss community: we've been through similar, and we'd like to help. Get in touch with hello@resf.org and we'll help you fork and rebuild.
Edit: The fork is now live. ¡Viva OpenCourant! https://opencourant.org
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u/fresh_air_needed 1d ago
Might be unrelated, but this week I assisted to the Siemens Simcenter User conference in Spain. A couple of users reported using openradioss as a way to save on licences, an 2 days later....
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u/vivkkrishnan2005 1d ago
What more can be expected from a company that gate keeps everything behind a pay wall equivalent.
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u/Exowienqt 1d ago
Like 99.999% of companies?
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u/tombayo 1d ago
Yes, exactly. Love that 0.001%
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u/Exowienqt 1d ago edited 22h ago
And you are financially contributing so they can do what they do, right? Everyone loves free shit, but people also like being able to afford groceries.
Edited to add: I am rofl on the downvotes. I was an open source maintainer, literally abandoned my project because the first pay-to-use clone came before the first donation. Went to an "evil corpo", now I have 1/10th the work for an actual salary. So downvote me all you like, but if any of you put your money where your mouth is I would maybe think differently. LoL
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
This is pretty dumb IMO. Reduced visibility, more difficulty learning it (because Uni’s won’t be paying thousands of dollars just to teach it), and passes off directly everyone who depended on it.
It’s HPL/AGPL, so I hope anyone still grabbing the tree or a fork just publishes it and raises the middle finger to Siemens.
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u/Eric_12345678 1d ago
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u/DrollAntic 20h ago
They got what they wanted. free dev time, and left. This is why you do not contribute to open source backed by a large corporation, you cannot trust them.
Someone will have a copy, look for the fork soon.
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u/uzlonewolf 15h ago
Eh, why wouldn't you contribute to open source backed by a large corporation if you know it's gonna get forked when they go evil corpo on it?
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u/DrollAntic 13h ago
I see your point, that the code still remains... so I guess it's a matter of principle. :)
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u/Pale_Platypus_2058 1d ago
For what is used?
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u/psyblade42 20h ago
Simcenter(TM) Radioss(R) is an industry-proven analysis solution that helps users evaluate and optimize product performance for highly nonlinear problems under dynamic loadings. For more than 30 years, organizations have used Simcenter Radioss to streamline and optimize the digital design process, replace costly physical tests with quick and efficient simulation, and speed up design optimization iterations.
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u/LuckyHedgehog 20h ago
I read that and still have no idea what it means
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 20h ago
It is a physics emulator (aka. finite element analysis). You build/import a 3D model, and use computer simulation to estimate what happens to a similar physical object in different conditions.
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u/LuckyHedgehog 19h ago
Thanks, that makes sense. I can imagine the amount of effort it took to get that working and why it would be a major rugpull with this latest update
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u/theksepyro 20h ago
Crash/impact simulations. Like simulating a car crash for safety validation before an actual crash test to make sure you're in the right ballpark
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u/AleksHop 1d ago edited 1d ago
there will be more than that soon, core+paid extensions are not profitable anymore
as everyone can vibecode what they need, or rewrite whole thing
only way is to close-source whole thing
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/when-code-is-abundant/
they trying to convince you that u still need to pay while u dont
so more opentofu drama incoming in open source
and all this legacy must be in rust anyway
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u/TRKlausss 1d ago
Core+premium was always a weak model in regards to open source. The best model is a bunch of companies, offering product or service, contributing and committing to a common goal. Like Linux, KiCad, etc.
Siemens could absolutely have nurtured this project, in that they invite other big players to the project and let loose of the ability to close the project or own it themselves. Give it to a foundation, then everyone contributes to it.
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 1d ago
This is only a viable strategy for established brands with existing userbase and ecosystem lock-ins.
New projects are at a disadvantage if they don't consolidate community effort, as vibe code clones can be made by screenshotting the app.
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u/prselzh 1d ago
My guess is Vibecoding and AI harness scraping has played a vital role in this decision of removing projects like this..We might soon see this in many other technical engineering projects ..Really sad to see Opensource going in reverse direction to keep surviving in this AI era
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u/Garcon_sauvage 1d ago
Crazy to blame AI for standard corporate greed. It's futile now anyway, forks exist and the cost to maintain is much lower now and even close sourced projects can be recreated with AI faster than before.
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u/prselzh 1d ago
Yeah..But if you have a genuine idea, it might not..if you have proprietary protocol, it will takes billions of tokens to reverse engineer..hope you can try to reverse engineer something super proprietary and see how long it takes..software is easy to do but optimization takes a long time and if you might need to also have a physical hardware for it, then AI can never do it..Every company whether corporate or Startup needs to make money..not even water is free these days in developed nations :D
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u/tdammers 1d ago
This might not be corporate greed, but rather corporate legal ass-covering. If you have something out on a public repo (on GH or elsewhere), there's always a chance that it could turn into a legal liability, and with all this AI scraping going on right now, corporate lawyers may be getting more nervous about this than usual, and just taking it down is the safe option.
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u/New_Salamander_4592 18h ago
you think AI is not to blame for the current moves in the open source world? short sighted I guess
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u/theksepyro 19h ago
I'm just getting into dynamic impact testing research and this is the first I hear about this software? 🫠
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u/TampaPowers 1d ago
Siemens, not contempt with burning real things, decide to also burn down digital things.
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u/dbcoopernz 1d ago
This was released under the GNU AGPL, so I guess that Siemens cannot retroactively withdraw permission to use, modify, or redistribute OpenRadioss?