I'm very delighted to be able to announce that after more than five years of on-going effort by more than 25 people, BRL-CAD is now available on Gentoo's main portage tree. Gentoo Linux users should be able to simply "emerge brlcad" and have a functioning install of BRL-CAD.

I'm happy to announce the availability of the BRL-CAD 7.16.6 source code. We are nearing the end of the 7.16 release line as features continue to be added and stabilized. Barring any unexpected issues, we expect to only make one more patch release before moving on to the 7.18 release line after next month.

This is a BRL-CAD community profile, a perspective vignette, from within our user community regarding a student project where BRL-CAD was used for an interesting academic purpose. It's a science project from three young ladies who, in the span of just a couple months, went from knowing pretty much nothing about modeling and BRL-CAD to creating a CAD model of their concept with rendered images and animations.

It's been a very LONG time since our last public release announcement but regardless, I'm happy to announce the availability of the BRL-CAD 7.16.4 source code! Binaries are not expected for this release, but we will likely be posting them for the next upcoming release.

For those that haven't heard about it yet, Ohloh is a site dedicated to categorizing, analyzing, and tracking software projects. While BRL-CAD has been indexed and tracked there [1] for some time now (we were one of the first), the statistics are continually updated and expanded upon. Among those recently updated, Ohloh found that more than 17 people have directly contributed to BRL-CAD in the last 12 months.

I am happy to announce that we have selected five individuals to work on BRL-CAD for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

We had many more desirable students than we have capacity to mentor, but we were able to finalize selections after an extensive review process that helped us get to know the students, their interests, and their capabilities. Sincere thanks and appreciation go out to everyone that submitted an application.

For our second year in a row, I'm delighted to announce that BRL-CAD has once again been accepted into the 2009 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! GSoC is a summer program hosted by Google every year where they pay students a stipend of $4500 to work on specific open source projects. It's a highly competitive program both for the students and for the mentoring organizations. This year, there were approximately 400 open source organizations that applied with 150 being selected to participate.

BRL-CAD uses a fantastic system called "CIA" to instantaneously announce source code changes to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) discussion channel. It has pretty much nothing to do with the US gov't agency of the same name, but everything to do with keeping the most dedicated members of our project instantly informed of on-going activities. Notoriously difficult to track, though, are changes made to our wiki ... until now.

Included below are some BRL-CAD project statistics that have been tabulated for the past fiscal year, from October 2007 to October 2008. It was rather interesting to pull the numbers to see how we compare to the previous year, so I thought I'd share with you some of the details. Since, we've not ever (publicly) done this before, a few words are worth mentioning before getting to the results...

I'm happy to (belatedly) announce the release of BRL-CAD 7.12.6 with several enhancements and bug fixes. Notably, NIRT gets several new output formatting options allowing users to easily select different data reporting options without having to define their own custom configuration files. The tire tool's behavior has been improved with better data protection, more editing flexibility, and improved rendering.