IBM Open-Sources 3D Data Visualization Software

Effugas writes " IBM has just released IBM Visualization Data Explorer under an Open Source license. Appears to be an impressively complex and powerful 3D data manipulation tool. If this is the same stuff I saw running back at LinuxWorld(realtime solid model deformation calculations of a crashing vehicle) I'm impressed. "

Re:Everyone and their mothers

[Anonymous Coward]

here is the license:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/dx/DXDLLicense.html

All the COOL!! software is on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked over the IBM website, and it looks like
you can create your own custom, dynamically loadable modules into the data explorer.

The OpenGL graphics client resides on a workstation and processing (SMP capable) may reside locally or on another machine.

With an object oriented, visual construction language, ( unlike 'Visual' Basic or 'Visual' C++) and an awesome visualization toolkit, this is pretty much a developers wet dream.

I work on a bank's trading floor, and this sort of client/server / graphical analysis package would cost a small fortune if it came from a boutique software shop. ( In fact we have spent millions - yes millions - on one of a kind, vendor proprietary graphics / data distribution software, and we are really LOCKED into the vendors whims of upgrades, and support)

With open source toolkits like ACE, Qt, and the above, its simply amazing what one can do on the linux platform.

With everything openSource, we can use one package with another, the sum much greater than the parts.


Bravo Linux and open source!!

This looks like khoros.

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks like khoros. Khoros lets you drag
and connect little image processing boxes
together to run experiments. Is this thing
close? Compare and contrast. Extra points for
source code examples (just kidding).

And is anyone following the Khoros licencing?
They used to be open source, but it seemed
for a while they were going backward!

-- cary

Khoros is at http://www.khoral.com

Other packages...

[Anonymous Coward]

While this DX is quite different ( and more powerful), people might be interested to know about other Open Source visualisation software :

The General Mesh Viewer:

www-xdiv.lanl.gov/XCM/gmv/GMVHome.htm l [lanl.gov]

Maverik:

aig.cs.man.ac.uk/systems/Maverik/ [man.ac.uk]

IBM releases "Open Source" yet again

[palpatine]

Shouldn't "Open Source" be in quotes when IBM is involved? First of all, notice how they tactically avoid the words "Open Source" in their press release, with phrases such as "open-source availability" and "open access to the source code."

I haven't seen any source licence, but I'm already guessing that it will be too restrictive to deserve the Open Source certification branding. Then again, I'd love to be proven wrong.

You have no idea how awesome this software is

[jabbo]

unless you have used it. I was working on trying to get around several of the (patented) techniques used in DX so as to build my own version of it... I guess I can finish writing that DX2Octave module that I was going to finish when I was at Cornell.

This software is *very* impressive. The screen shots on www.almaden.ibm.com don't convey what's really cool about DX -- check out this page [cornell.edu] for a better idea of how DX makes really nasty visualization tasks simple.

This rules as much as SGI releasing XFS, not to put too fine a point on it. (Although SGI appears not to be releasing LVM support for XFS -- d'oh.)

Looks like I've got my activity for the rest of this week's afternoons (at least). Now I just need to send notes to everyone I tried to explain DX to saying "Just download it, it's Free now".

So where is the license?

[kfogel]

Until they show the actual license, there
is no way to know if it really will be
"Open Source". I searched all around the
site for it, no sign.

Remembering Apple,
-Karl

Yay!

[Chris Mikkelson]

I hope this means no more license managers for that product!

License not released yet

[Bruce Perens]

IBM has not yet released the license. Let's wait for them to release it.

By the way, if you've been looking for me or my net sites, my darned DSL provider, "Dspeed", went out of business. It's just as well, considering how many outages I had. Covad now has to switch all of their dspeed.net customers elsewhere, and might take a week to get that done.

Use [e-mail] until further notice.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Everyone and their mothers

[Col. Klink (retired)]

This looks like an old license. The page is dated July 1998 and doesn't look remotely "open-sourced". It talks about it being a "trial version" and limited functionality. I dunno how they can limit the functionality and release source code, which their main site claims they will be doing. I suspect a NEW license will be available when the download is ready.

Data explorer to Matlab

[choo]

I've written a Data Explorer to Matlab module.
So you can call Matlab from Data Explorer.
Take a look:
http://www.people.corne ll.edu/pages/sc110/dx2mat/dx2mat.htm [cornell.edu]

Data explorer Mpegs

[choo]

Oh, and check out some cool mpegs done in Data Explorer:
http://www.tc .cornell.edu/Visualization/contrib/cs418-sp94/cs41 8.html [cornell.edu]

Everyone and their mothers

[redhog]

  Everyone and their mothers seems to be opensource licensing their products. That's good. So, soon we'l have our files on XFS and our data made visible with Data Explorer.
  The site seems to be a litle bit thin; there is no trace of the license under which it will be released. But OK, they say they will open the download in two days, and the license may be included in the source tar-ball...

Re:Everyone and their mothers

[redhog]

That wasn't an open source license, from what I can see it's a free trial license...

MODERATORS: take note

[ivan_13013]

this post that I am replying to does not contain anything that would appear to merit scoring it at -1, and neither did his previous post which was nearly identical in content. Probably nobody will answer the post seriously, since it didn't even go so far as to define the acronyms or provide any useful information. Nonetheless, a 0 or 1 score would be more appropriate according to the moderator guidelines [slashdot.org].

License is there now

[SEWilco]

On the announced date, the license is now available on the download link. I am not a lawyer, but I see that it does require that the source code of a product be available. So alterations of the original will be available.

There also is a clause about patent licenses. Some parts of the program are covered by patents, and the license allows use of the patented features in this program but revokes the license on source code for patented features which is removed from this program. So we can improve this program, but there are restrictions on using some of this code in other programs.

IBM's Data Explorer feedback

[trancemonkey]

So I've had a little indirect exposure to Data Explorer. I've heard what users think about using it,
and it's mostly been negative, on the order of
"Please find us a better sci-vis package...pleasepleasepleaseplease!!!!!"

I haven't personally used it, though, and users, are...well...
users. ;-)