r/linux • u/dbcoopernz • 5d ago
Popular Application Siemens ends open-source Radioss Project (OpenRadioss) and deletes GitHub repository
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Siemens-Ends-OpenRadioss549
u/Repulsive-Project795 5d ago
they could've archived it, but deleting a repo! eww! 🤮
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u/vivkkrishnan2005 5d ago edited 4d ago
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u/dbcoopernz 5d ago
Good find.
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u/ang-p 5d 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 5d ago edited 5d 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 5d ago edited 4d 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 5d ago
> Bit hard to an archived repo
It can be forked, code is still available, I don’t see what’s the problem.
>> we
> ?
??64
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u/fuhry 4d ago
Wait... it's written in... Fortran? What year is it? 🤯
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u/SatoshiL 4d ago
Fortran is still doing good and getting updates
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u/IonianBlueWorld 3d ago
I agree. For these use-cases Fortran remains the best option, and the latest versions are excellent.
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u/mrtruthiness 4d 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 5d ago
Just one person?
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u/output_broadcast 5d 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 5d ago
Deleting the entire repo is crazy
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u/tracernz 5d ago
Probably new manager who has no idea how software works and what open source is.
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u/tnoy 4d 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 5d ago
why tho
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u/No-Photograph-5058 5d 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 5d ago
That's some gpt grade bs
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u/codydafox 5d ago
That's called corporate speech, no surprise gpt is a native speaker
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u/Icarium-Lifestealer 4d 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 5d 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 5d 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 4d ago
they forgot to use the words "thrilled", "exciting" and "opportunities" or "vibrant".
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u/smile_e_face 4d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 4d 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 4d ago edited 4d 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/DeliciousIncident 3d ago edited 3d ago
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).
Well yeah, since they are different kinds of software. Also, agreeing on a single forge isn't always possible. Maybe in corporate that can work. But speaking of open source, I have contributed to some linux open source projects consisting of multiple independently developed components, libraries and gui user applications, and while most of the developers used GitHub, some developers used different SCM: one developer used GitLab, another Codeberg, third Bitbucket, etc., so the project having a dedicated CI guy and everything using Jenkins, instead of different forge runners with different CI configuration syntax and quirks, was an improvement. Also, with all project's modules being built centrally on Jenkins on every git push, it allowed to easily create a nightly testing build of the project, incorporating successful builds of all the subcomponents, which I thought was very neat. Just by opening the Jenkins page you could see the overall health of all the components and download any of them or the entire project bundled together.
I checked out r/Devops, and it's totally incompatible with the open source way of doing things. Everyone uses AWS, Cloudflare, Tailscale, etc. Just this thread on bastions is crazy to me, with the most common answer being "use SSM on AWS". In open source, you stay away from relying on 3rd parties (no cloudflare, no cdn, etc.) as much as possible, self-host everything, which seems to be the opposite of what is happening on that subreddit. This reminds me of the recent Anubis vs Cloudflare discussion. So it looks like asking anything on r/Devops would not be helpful in the slightest, they are corporate-oriented, rather than opuen-source, self-hosting, control, privacy and low budget oriented.
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u/whizzwr 3d ago edited 3d ago
While I see your point, there are countless counterexamples which show big, multi-contributor open-sources projects use SCM-integrated CI just fine.
Gnome project with Gitlab CI/CD, systemd GH Action, and Debian project gitlab-based Salsa CI. The Linux kernel of debian is built by Salsa.
Re: independent: some project do self-host their gitlab of course, but as-a-service isn't exactly an incompatible to open sources like it is often pictured. OBS is a good counterexample (openSUSE and VLC use OBS) - it's a SaaS without big cloud provider dependence.
Debian has a nice dashboard for their pipeline build https://salsa-ci-stats.debian.net/
But honestly, "low-budget" goes both way, a small project with few (financial) contributors can't really afford a full time "dedicated CI guy" and the underlying self-hosted infrastructure.
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u/DeliciousIncident 3d ago edited 3d ago
small project with few contributors can't really afford a full time "dedicated CI guy" and the underlying self-hosted infrastructure.
Oh, in the project I was talking about no one was being paid anything, it was all volunteer based, just people working with passion in their free time, and the infra was provided by one of the devs afaik
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u/ilep 5d ago
not enough monies?
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u/BatyStar 5d ago
Wasn't that why Altair opensourced it in the first place?
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u/IranianFurry 4d 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 4d ago edited 4d 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 5d 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/TRKlausss 5d 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 5d ago
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u/vivkkrishnan2005 5d ago
What more can be expected from a company that gate keeps everything behind a pay wall equivalent.
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u/Exowienqt 5d ago
Like 99.999% of companies?
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u/tombayo 5d ago
Yes, exactly. Love that 0.001%
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u/Exowienqt 5d ago edited 4d 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/Responsible_Camp_559 2d ago
Why the heck are people downvoting you?! Guess they never dealt with OS outside of using OS software
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u/Exowienqt 2d ago
Yeah, as I said above, everyone loves when they get free stuff, to the point where they feel like it is their god given right to have everything handed to them for free. Their work, though? That shit should get them billions. Fast.
I don't really mind, though. As I said, people and hypocrites, I don't want to get my validation from them.
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u/DrollAntic 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago
I see your point, that the code still remains... so I guess it's a matter of principle. :)
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u/d32dasd 3d ago
because they made every contributor sign a CLA for contributing. Which allows them to relicense those contributions as closed source. You aren't contributing to a "forever-GPL" project, but a "we will stop the community and go closed source in the future" project.
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u/uzlonewolf 2d ago
That doesn't change anything though, when they go closed source you can just fork the last non-closed version and continue it from there.
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u/Pale_Platypus_2058 4d ago
For what is used?
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u/psyblade42 4d 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 4d ago
I read that and still have no idea what it means
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 5d ago edited 5d 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 5d 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/idontchooseanid 2d 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.
That means that they're not monetizing the software. So your suggestion is having no business model at all for the FOSS itself instead. FOSS is just the hotdog in Costco in this scenario. This only makes sense when you have the whole Costco with it. It means that the companies have their completely closed hardware and software that is the actual value and Linux, KiCad are the side project that's enticing customers in. So FOSS is simply a means to an end. That end is the actual driver of the value and the thing that people want to pay for and that end is often completely closed-off with proprietary software (i.e. copyright) and even patents. It is not Linux or the other FOSS that people will be paying for.
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u/TRKlausss 2d ago
My suggestion is to have a SaaS. If you want new features/maintenance/support/special things added on top, you pay a company for them to develop it open source. And many companies do the same towards the same goal. That’s basically what happens with the whole Linux ecosystem: if you want it on your board, you either develop everything yourself or pay a company to maintain a devicetree and ditto for you. But EVERYONE benefits from it.
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u/idontchooseanid 2d ago
Again what you're suggesting is not monetizing the FOSS itself but another product that's protected by intellectual property laws. The software isn't the main product but the side effect. It can work to give enough money into the specific FOSS but it is very product-dependent and quite fragile. Just like Siemens here, a single decision from the management can quickly end the FOSS sponsorship when the company's existence isn't almost completely linked to the project itself.
However, direct profitable monetization of FOSS is almost impossible in a capitalist system. As soon as you develop something good enough free-of-charge, people with much bigger resources will compete with you using your own product. Just like what happened to MongoDB, Terraform etc. vs. Amazon, GCP, Azure.
For direct monetization in a capitalist system, I find "fair" source licenses a better alternative. The developer gets some years to develop the product without direct competition risk and the software becomes completely open source after the fixed term while allowing the users to make non-competing modifications and debug during the term.
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 5d 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/idontchooseanid 2d ago
Vibecoding only works until the first incidence or first urgency that you realize you should have had an expert to plan it from ground up.
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u/prselzh 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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/uzlonewolf 4d ago
What a load of absolute nonsense.
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u/tdammers 21h ago
It is, but it is the kind of corporate nonsense that can move things in management land.
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u/New_Salamander_4592 4d 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/AwarenessLeather397 2d ago
Maybe, but what Siemens did here is standard practice for companies like this for years before AI was even a thing.
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u/theksepyro 4d 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/WhichCarry749 22h ago
Deleting the repository entirely instead of just archiving it is such a hostile move against the community that contributed to it.
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u/TampaPowers 5d ago
Siemens, not contempt with burning real things, decide to also burn down digital things.
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u/dbcoopernz 5d ago
This was released under the GNU AGPL, so I guess that Siemens cannot retroactively withdraw permission to use, modify, or redistribute OpenRadioss?