Open CASCADE Technology

Open CASCADE Technology is a Software Development Kit ( SDK) to develop 3D applications such as CAD, CAM, CAE. Open CASCADE is available under a LGPL -like license for Linux, Solaris and Windows.

Since version 6.7.0, the software is released under the terms of the LGPL version 2.1 and is thus compatible with the GPL ( version 2 and later ). Earlier versions were released under its own license, which was not recognized by the OSI and thus resulted in problems for use by other projects.

Technical Support and Development for Open CASCADE be made by the company OPEN CASCADE SAS, the product is used by different customers, inter alia, in the aerospace and automotive industry.

The CAD program GraphiteOne and Pre-/Post-processing-Programm Salome based on Open CASCADE. Open source projects that use Open CASCADE techniques, for example, are HeeksCAD and FreeCAD.

For data exchange, Open CASCADE has interfaces such as STEP ( AP203/214 scheme), IGES ( 5.3) and BRep ( a pure open CASCADE format).

The program library has a circumference of about 200 MB, plus an additional 200 MB documentation.

There is also the possibility of Open CASCADE with the Python programming language ( pythonOCC ) to use.