Siemens ends open-source Radioss Project (OpenRadioss) and deletes GitHub repository

531

u/dbcoopernz 1d ago

This was released under the GNU AGPL, so I guess that Siemens cannot retroactively withdraw permission to use, modify, or redistribute OpenRadioss?

135

u/whnz Rocky Linux Team 19h ago edited 18h ago

Correct, they cannot retroactively withdraw the permissions granted by the AGPL but they can issue future versions under a different license. We're holding the most recent copy of the code I can find at https://github.com/resf/OpenRadioss and we'll try to help their community rebuild.

The Rocky Linux project / RESF started in an HPC community (HPCng), we have quite a bit of user / community overlap, and we've dealt with similar issues, so I'm hoping we can be of some assistance.

Edit: The fork is now live. ¡Viva OpenCourant! https://opencourant.org

11

u/AwarenessLeather397 13h ago

Thanks for that! Is this the latest version of the repo before Siemens deleted it?

6

u/whnz Rocky Linux Team 6h ago

It's the latest one I could find. Unfortunately I didn't have an automatically updated mirror, so it might be missing a commit or two.

6

u/ivosaurus 12h ago

Did the previous repo allow outside contributors? Does Siemens have copyright / licensing over 100% of the code base?

7

u/1saltypistachio 13h ago

Thanks Rocky person!

119

u/AtlanticPortal 1d ago

No, whatever is in the hands of people who can use the AGPL version is totally fine to be shared and, actually, must be shared to people who are using that program. Basically, whatever is out there means that the cat is out of the bag. New kitties, aren’t.

24

u/TRKlausss 1d ago

New kittens are, in that Siemens could force you to release any new development under AGPL too (is the part of “our modifications to the software”), but we all assume that if someone does that, they will already do that open source…

37

u/wintrmt3 21h ago

But Siemens can only use those patches under the AGPL, so it's worth nothing to them.

3

u/Adept_Percentage6893 13h ago

The owners of the new "kittens" already benefit from a stable base to start from. So I can't imagine it's a big deal to not be able to close source on their contributions.

The real bottleneck is just that the number of stakeholders for this type of project is pretty limited so if it's going to continue it's probably going to be a "industry consortium" situation (even if only informally). It's not like people are continually running crash simulations in their home labs.

-20

u/Secret_Wishbone_2009 1d ago

You can clean room reconstruct the code using code->spec->code and agentic AI development to remove/change license. Not saying its good just that it is possible

6

u/amarao_san 22h ago

I think, bits will be colored in such case.

But, if you split it into two parts: one is description (aka specs), zero code, done by one team, and the second team implement code by reading only that description, it will be legally defensible. But with LLM ability to short-cut, there is high chance of direct citations. The source code will be in the training database, so I doubt it can be called clean room.

But, if someone train LLM with explicitly excluding the original repo from the training database... Nah, fat chance.

6

u/TRKlausss 1d ago

And that’s where waters get muddied: if you show the AI the code first to derive specs to rewrite it, isn’t that the definition of derivative work?

If the AI does it from scratch with instructions you gave it, based on millions of other repos, it may be fine, but if you instruct the AI to reimplement the exact same constructs… Sounds like a derivative to me, idk.

I’m expecting however to see a new license from the FSF, something like GPL4, where all this is clarified. Something like a clause saying “if your LLM is trained with this code, the product shall be released as GLP4 as well” or something similar.

8

u/gurgelblaster 23h ago

That is definitively derivative work. Running a sed script to replace all spaces with tabs, tabs with spaces, and switch case on every letter doesn't mean it's a new piece of work.

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u/No-Photograph-5058 1d ago

No idea, they apparently made contributors sign a 'Contributor Licence Agreement', that I don't know the content of, and I'm not sure how that works legally if it somehow 'forces' people to agree to licence changes

https://github.com/gabrielrussell/OpenRadioss/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

152

u/nullptr777 1d ago

Even if the CLA does allow that, a license change isn't retroactive. If you have the old source code where it states that it's AGPL, then you can do whatever you want with it under the terms of that license.

140

u/SanityInAnarchy 1d ago

Depending on the terms, these may allow the project to release a new version under a new license.

But, if anyone has a copy of the original version under its original license, nothing stops them from forking from that.

1

u/MIGoneCamping 11h ago

I would guess that it has more to do with the possibility that code contributed to the OSS project could end up in the commercial product that is derived from it.

55

u/AtlanticPortal 1d ago

The CLA means that they don’t have to ask for permission to put a new license on the contributions of other people, not that the already released code under AGPL changes its license for people who get in contact with it.

59

u/shinyfootwork 1d ago

Correct, they can't retroactively un-grant an AGPL license that has already been granted

8

u/TRKlausss 1d ago

Not for any version released under that license, it does not cover future development (since they are the owners, they may change that license for future development.

They cannot stop you from republishing anything released under AGPL, and ironically they are allowed to force you to open spruce any future development on it…

9

u/syklemil 16h ago

Yeah, and that's a lesson that plenty other companies have learned, see e.g. Redis, Terraform, Elasticsearch.

CLAs are generally a smell in open source, as there's really no need for them unless someone is planning to pull a license switch later, but even then, the old versions remain free software.

What's kinda weird is AGPL + CLA seems like they already had the opportunity to make people choose between using a super viral license or paying them for the same code under a different license, so it's not immediately clear what they gain from this move, apart from competition from some inevitable fork.

503

u/Repulsive-Project795 1d ago

they could've archived it, but deleting a repo! eww! 🤮

464

u/vivkkrishnan2005 1d ago edited 18h ago

https://github.com/gabrielrussell/OpenRadioss

Someone forked and kept

EDIT - Community Repo - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1wvj2th/comment/pddw55t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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u/dbcoopernz 1d ago

Good find.

30

u/ang-p 1d ago

There are a few offsite links towards the bottom of that README that are still live, returning pdfs, but dunno for how long.

28

u/TRKlausss 1d ago edited 22h 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 :/

10

u/ang-p 23h ago edited 21h 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

?

7

u/TRKlausss 22h ago

> Bit hard to an archived repo

It can be forked, code is still available, I don’t see what’s the problem.

>> we
> ?
??

3

u/ang-p 22h ago

It is there.

Feel free.

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u/paul_h 1d ago

Forking person/team should delete “We will ask you to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)” straight away

6

u/fuhry 18h ago

Wait... it's written in... Fortran? What year is it? 🤯

10

u/SatoshiL 16h ago

Fortran is still doing good and getting updates

4

u/mrtruthiness 16h 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.

1

u/QuirkyRing3521 10h ago

No, this from LLNL — program called Dyna.

3

u/dekeonus 23h ago

the LFS objects in that repo 404 though

2

u/CardOk755 1d ago

Just one person?

10

u/japzone 1d ago

Might just be someone who wanted to preserve the code. Anybody can then fork from him though, if they want to continue the project.

3

u/output_broadcast 1d 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.

0

u/vbd71 1d ago

Expect lawfare.

24

u/aksdb 1d ago

Could be they switched it to private. I am pretty sure that looks like a 404 to non org members.

-4

u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

2

u/aksdb 23h ago

How do you know? Are you an employee and can see the private repos of the org to know it’s not there?

158

u/VirtualNerve26 1d ago

Deleting the entire repo is crazy

88

u/tracernz 22h ago

Probably new manager who has no idea how software works and what open source is.

16

u/smile_e_face 11h ago

"Whaddya mean we're just putting OUR code out there on the Internet?!"

1

u/tnoy 3h 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.

71

u/ddwrt1234 1d ago

why tho

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u/No-Photograph-5058 1d 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

223

u/NeuroXc 1d ago

That's a lot of words to say "We want money"

70

u/-Sa-Kage- 1d ago

Now we've profited off the communities efforts, we want to monetize this.

54

u/iamapizza 1d ago

That's some gpt grade bs

86

u/codydafox 1d ago

That's called corporate speech, no surprise gpt is a native speaker

55

u/Icarium-Lifestealer 22h 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

3

u/FaultWinter3377 18h ago

Holy shit best quote I’m keeping it.

15

u/TRKlausss 1d ago

Garbage in, garbage out.

26

u/Klutzy-Residen 1d ago

Not everything is AI. That way of using a lot of words to say nothing has been around for a looooong time.

7

u/frankster 23h ago

Corporations were adept at bullshitting long before llms!

7

u/darth_chewbacca 1d ago

But now the guys got siemans as a partner. Trouble with the code he can go to siemans...

https://youtu.be/3XGAmPRxV48?si=VvQSjtzDQScqt_Zb

1

u/howardhus 15h ago

they forgot to use the words "thrilled", "exciting" and "opportunities" or "vibrant".

1

u/smile_e_face 11h 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.

52

u/whizzwr 1d 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.

16

u/TRKlausss 1d 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…

19

u/ddwrt1234 1d ago

cultivating synergies for the cross functional stakeholders across verticals

Sounds about right

Let's not boil the ocean

2

u/BigJimKen 23h ago

I still use Jenkins 😭

2

u/d_maes 1d 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.

2

u/frankster 23h 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.

1

u/xplosm 7h ago

Oh, so regular manglement. Got it.

•

u/DeliciousIncident 28m 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?

11

u/ilep 1d ago

not enough monies?

8

u/BatyStar 1d ago

Wasn't that why Altair opensourced it in the first place?

2

u/IranianFurry 19h ago

Got bought put by Siemens

Siemens is being a right cunt (as usual, for Siemens)

2

u/Clou42 1d ago

Altair got acquired, sooner or later that means merging teams and products and getting rid of things that are not of priority for the new owner.

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u/whnz Rocky Linux Team 20h ago edited 18h 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

2

u/DoYaKnowMahName 15h ago

Another rocky W

2

u/reini_urban 10h ago

Still need to fixup all the references to the old domain and emails.

122

u/fresh_air_needed 1d 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....

25

u/ashvy 23h ago

Yoink

97

u/vivkkrishnan2005 1d ago

What more can be expected from a company that gate keeps everything behind a pay wall equivalent.

13

u/Exowienqt 1d ago

Like 99.999% of companies?

7

u/tombayo 22h ago

Yes, exactly. Love that 0.001%

-12

u/Exowienqt 22h ago edited 18h 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

40

u/TRKlausss 1d 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.

21

u/Eric_12345678 1d ago

https://github.com/gabrielrussell/OpenRadioss

2

u/angrox 1d ago

archived since ... today.

26

u/slavmaf 23h ago

Yes, they just made a backup of the stuff that Siemens deleted. They did not want to start a new fork, but thanks to them, now someone can start a new fork.

13

u/audigex 18h ago

That’s just indicating they don’t intend to maintain it as an ongoing project, but they’re making it available for others

2

u/angrox 17h ago

thanks. I was just wondering why it was archived at once. Makes sense.

28

u/DrollAntic 15h 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.

3

u/uzlonewolf 10h 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?

1

u/DrollAntic 9h ago

I see your point, that the code still remains... so I guess it's a matter of principle. :)

2

u/-Memnarch- 11h ago

With the original repo deleted, one of the fork got promoted to original

2

u/Tactical-Donkey 10h ago

Wait, whaaaat. A large corp is untrustworthy?

/s

13

u/Pale_Platypus_2058 20h ago

For what is used?

7

u/psyblade42 16h 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.

21

u/LuckyHedgehog 16h ago

I read that and still have no idea what it means

12

u/Ghost_x_Knight 16h 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.

2

u/LuckyHedgehog 15h 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

1

u/I_dont_like_tomatoes 15h ago

Neat

2

u/theksepyro 15h 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

1

u/I_dont_like_tomatoes 15h ago

Same can’t even picture what this is for

7

u/mallrat32 17h ago

I’m going to fork it and brand it a Theranos project

5

u/Ok-Oil7919 19h ago

Garbage Siemens, they always mess up good things.

2

u/neoh4x0r 20h ago

If someone wanted to continue development they could fork this repo.

2

u/lopahcreon 12h ago

I read what it’s about. I still don’t know what it’s about.

3

u/AleksHop 1d ago edited 1d 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

7

u/TRKlausss 1d 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.

6

u/Ghost_x_Knight 1d 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.

-4

u/prselzh 1d 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

41

u/Garcon_sauvage 1d 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.

1

u/Far_Calligrapher1334 13h ago

As if AI and corporate greed aren't going hand in hand anyway.

-9

u/prselzh 1d 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

-12

u/tdammers 1d 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.

1

u/uzlonewolf 10h ago

What a load of absolute nonsense.

-1

u/New_Salamander_4592 14h ago

you think AI is not to blame for the current moves in the open source world? short sighted I guess

1

u/theksepyro 15h ago

I'm just getting into dynamic impact testing research and this is the first I hear about this software? 🫠

1

u/Sparky_Otter 12h ago

When companies do this crap, that means they are getting desperate for money

1

u/woolharbor 11h ago

It's open source. Anyone can reupload it, anyone can continue developing it.

1

u/borg_6s 22h ago

You cannot just delete a repo like that

0

u/TampaPowers 23h ago

Siemens, not contempt with burning real things, decide to also burn down digital things.

-5

u/Own_Measurement4378 1d ago

Y nadie hizo una rama ?

Popular Application Siemens ends open-source Radioss Project (OpenRadioss) and deletes GitHub repository