The OpenRadioss fork is already drawing an impressive community as contributors help restore builds and missing components.
Open source is having another “the king is dead; long live the king” moment.
Last week Siemens announced it was replacing open source OpenRadioss with a proprietary project with a slightly different name: Simcenter Radioss.
While OpenRadioss wasn’t anything approaching being a household name, it was important software. Originally developed as a proprietary project by Altair Engineering, it’s designed for simulating highly nonlinear, transient dynamic events, making it particularly useful in various engineering fields. Its main purpose is analyzing crashes, impacts, blasts, and other dynamic scenarios, and it’s used by everyone from automakers to military contractors.
The Move Private
Altair open sourced the project in 2022 — although not all of its dependencies — and continued to administer and largely develop the project in-house. Last year, Siemens took control of the project when it acquired Altair.
On October 1, Michael Larabel announced on Phoronix that OpenRadioss was being replaced by proprietary Simcenter Radioss.
You would think Siemens would know better, especially after the brouhaha that developed when HashiCorp and Redis both tried to flip their flagship open source projects to proprietary licenses, only to find their software turned into forks that have since thrived. It’s obvious that the company attempted to keep that from happening here. Before announcing the change, it removed OpenRadioss’s code from GitHub in an apparent attempt to make it difficult to find a clean copy to fork.
Although that did present something of a speed bump, it didn’t work.
The Grand Reopening
On the same day as Larabel’s report, Brian Clemens, a founder and VP of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and Rocky Linux (a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), announced that OpenRadioss was being forked under the name OpenCourant, using the latest version of the software that Clemens and his team could get their hands on. The new project would retain the GNU AGPL v3 license, and a GitHub repository was already operational.
I say “being forked” because the forked project was having trouble getting their hands on some necessary dependencies, an issue that was largely resolved by this Monday, according to the new project’s website:
“OpenRadioss relied on a proprietary input-reader library that was never kept in git. When the upstream repositories went down, it went with them, and the newest copies we could recover from public sources were months older than the rest of the code base expected.
“So we asked whether anyone still had one. Someone did. A community member had archived the original package, we verified it against an independently recovered binary of the same build, and it is now the reader in every Linux build we publish. The starter uses the solver’s native part API again instead of a compatibility fallback.”
By Tuesday, OpenCourant was announcing that it was shipping for all three platforms that had previously been supported by Radioss: Linux x86-64, Linux arm64, and Windows x86-64.
“We first shipped a single platform, the other two now exist because people sent us files. Thank you!”
Some critical software still hasn’t been recovered so the forked software isn’t totally up and running, with the project’s leaders evidently hoping that the missing software will surface as the OpenCourant community attracts more members migrating from OpenRadioss:
“One reader function is still missing on every platform. Listing include files goes through a compatibility path, because the function that replaces it only exists in a reader newer than anything recovered so far. If you have an OpenRadioss package from August or September 2026, please check it.”
“The open reader is the durable fix. The AGPL-licensed reader already in the repository is a handful of functions from replacing the closed one outright, on every platform. Finishing it ends this entire category of problem. No more hoping the right zip file is in someone’s downloads folder.”
This new project is calling for anyone who was a part of the OpenRadioss community in any capacity to reconnect through one of the following channels:
- Forum: GitHub Discussions
- Chat: the #opencourant channel on the Rocky Linux Mattermost
- Email: hello@opencourant.org
- Code: github.com/OpenCourant/OpenCourant
“We especially want to hear from former OpenRadioss maintainers and community leaders,” the project’s website says. “The goal is for this project’s technical direction and governance to be shaped by the people who know it best.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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