OpenCourant

The first OpenCourant builds are here

When we announced OpenCourant on October 1, the honest summary was that the code was safe and the lights were on. That was about all we could claim. It is no longer all we can claim.

OpenCourant now publishes automated builds. Stable Linux x86-64 packages are available from the new downloads page — compiled from source, gated on the regression suite, and released straight from continuous integration.

What it took

The delivery pipeline we inherited did not survive the shutdown. It depended on an internal container registry, self-hosted runners, a private binary repository, and a second private source repository — none of which came with the code. Every one of those had to be replaced before a single package could ship.

It has been rebuilt on OpenCourant’s own infrastructure, using our own CI images. The regression suite now runs as a gate before packaging, so a build that fails QA is never published. The anim_to_vtk and th_to_csv converters, which used to arrive as prebuilt binaries from a repository we no longer have, are compiled from source in OpenCourant/Tools as part of the same pipeline.

The community already fixed something

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.

One request, one answer, and every download since is better for it. That is the entire premise of this project working as intended, inside a week.

What is still missing

We would rather be specific than optimistic:

  • Windows and Linux arm64 packages. Windows needs runners, a compiler toolchain, and open replacements for several vendor-internal build dependencies. arm64 is blocked on a reader binary that may not exist in public hands at all. Both already have placeholders on the downloads page and will appear there automatically as soon as the builds do.
  • A second reader fallback is still active. Listing include files still goes through a compatibility path, because the function that replaces it only exists in a newer reader than anyone has recovered so far.
  • /ALE/STRUCTURED_MESH remains unsupported and is rejected explicitly rather than silently producing bad meshes.
  • The open reader is the durable fix. The AGPL-licensed reader already in the repository is a handful of functions short of replacing the proprietary one on every platform, ARM included. Finishing it removes this entire class of problem permanently.

Still looking for people

The infrastructure is the easy part. The harder and more important work is reassembling the community, and settling how this project is governed, with the people who built it.

If you worked with OpenRadioss in any capacity — contributor, maintainer, researcher, industrial user, student — please reconnect:

And if you have old OpenRadioss release files or build directories sitting in a downloads folder somewhere, check them. We are still looking.