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.

I'm happy to announce the availability of BRL-CAD 7.12.4. This release contains numerous enhancements to MGED's mirror command, now with the ability to mirror an object across arbitrary vectors or points along a standard axis. Additionally, NIRT now has a new "gap" option for reporting the empty spaces between objects with additional formatting options being considered. The release also has an impressive new procedural database geometry tool for generating vehicle tires.

There's a great new tutorial on the MGED 'oed' object edit command now available. This tutorial was written by Cliff Yapp and provides a good introduction to some of the fundamental command-line object editing capabilities in MGED.

With a few minor updates, bug fixes, and tweaks, the 7.12.2 release is now available. Contrary to the 7.12.0 release notes, we're *actually* finally providing an updated installer for Windows (really .. it's already uploaded!). With much thanks and appreciation, we now have a new and improved installer for BRL-CAD on Windows due to the efforts of Jonathan Bonomo. There are also useful enhancements to RT, RTAREA, and MGED's clone and saveview commands among other enhancements.