Re:'this could be useful...' (Score 1)

But I thought that TGS (template graphics systems) "owned" Inventor now...maybe they just licensed it and the contract just expired, I don't know, but TGS has been the company maintaining it for the last couple of years.

No, TGS doesn't own Open Inventor. SGI owns it and deserves a lot of credit for the elegant design, productivity and extensibility possible with this toolkit. At least SGI owns the v2.1 source now released under LGPL.

TGS licensed the Open Inventor source many years ago and made v2.1 available on all the other platforms (including Linux). When SGI stopped working on Open Inventor (around '96 I think), TGS effectively took over maintenance and development too. The current release is version 2.6 and is still offered by TGS as a commercial release.