SGI Acquires OpenFoam

OpenFoam is probably the most mature open source CFD tool available. There are plenty of niche CFD projects on SourceForge, but none that have really been able to generate the user/developer community that OpenFoam has. OpenFoam recently made the news because SGI "purchased" it for an undisclosed amount.

"Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is one of the most important application areas for technical computing," said SGI CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. "With the acquisition of OpenCFD Ltd., SGI will be able to provide our customers the market's first fully integrated CFD solution, where all the hardware and software work together."

Basically, they hired all of the developers:

The entire OpenCFD team, led by Henry Weller, has joined SGI as full-time employees and will be based out of SGI's EMEA Headquarters located in the UK. SGI Acquires Maker of Open Source CFD Software

They also created the OpenFoam Foundation to ensure the continued development of OpenFoam under a GPL license. This is a very good thing for the development of OpenFoam to really take off. The foundation means that a true commons can develop around the software. SGI is clearly using OpenFoam as widget frosting, and they are selling support. This means their incentives line up with making the open version as good as it can be rather than crippling it in deference to a paid "pro" version. Good news for open source computational fluid dynamics.