Altair Debuts Open Source and Free Basic Editions of MBD Offerings

Altair has released and made available its free Basic Editions of its Model-Based Development suite and its open matrix language (OML) source code. To help accelerate the time-to-benefits from Model-Based Development (MBD) and to make MBD more open and accessible, Altair is taking the following steps:

1. Open-sourcing its open-source computational programming language, OML. Interested users and contributors can download the source code from the OpenMatrix website.
2. Introducing Basic Editions of its MBD suite of software products—Altair Compose, Altair Activate and AltairEmbed—available at no cost, with free training videos available online via Altair’s open Learning Center.  There are no license fees, nor any subscription or maintenance fees.

“From the beginning, Altair’s MBD solutions have involved open standards like Python scripting, Modelica modeling and Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI),” says Brett Chouinard, president of Altair. “Altair is now open-sourcing its open matrix language—a high-level, matrix-based numerical computing language—to encourage interested scientists and engineers to expand the language, add toolboxes and employ it for their math modeling and simulation tasks.”

“Model-Based Development is a key enabler for the most innovative product development organizations. Altair’s bold move to lower the barrier-of-entry to usage and broaden the community has the potential to significantly disrupt the systems modeling and simulation market,” notes Don Tolle, director of Simulation-Driven Systems Development Practice at CIMdata.

These Basic Editions are available to everybody—including students, course instructors, researchers, hobbyists, makers and engineers in industry. For example, the Basic Edition of Altair Compose enables access to the entire open matrix language, including bridges to Python, using the easy-to-use Compose Integrated Development Environment (IDE).  More advanced features and professional support are available via Professional Editions, which extend the Basic Edition capabilities by enabling access to the valuable Altair HyperWorks CAE Readers.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.