Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Many businesses, of course, use Computer Aided Design (CAD) software for all sorts of technical and scientific purposes. There are a number of well-known commercial CAD packages available, led by the popular AutoCAD application from Autodesk. None of these are inexpensive, however, and the high cost of CAD may be crippling, especially for smaller businesses just starting out.

One alternative to these high costs is BRL-CAD, an Open Source constructive solid geometry solid modeling package. BRL-CAD is truly cross-platform software, available on Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, BSD, and IRIX. In addition to basic CAD and modeling, the package includes parallel ray-tracing, path-tracing, image and signal processing tools.

Designed by Mike Muuss beginning in 1979, more or less on a dare, the system has been used extensively by the U.S. Military for years in the design of weapons systems. It has one of the best pedigrees in the business and supports the wide variety of operating systems shown above and an even wider variety of file formats. In many ways, the package is second to none. Interested readers are encouraged to read the BRL-CAD wiki for much more information.