OpenCourant Becomes the First RESF Incubator Project

Key points

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), the foundation behind Rocky Linux, has accepted OpenCourant as its first Incubator Project. OpenCourant is an open source finite element solver for crash, impact and highly nonlinear dynamic simulation, and it continues the code base previously released as OpenRadioss.

Why the fork exists

• On October 1, 2026, Siemens discontinued OpenRadioss, the open source release of the Radioss solver that Altair first published in 2022. The website was taken offline and the GitHub repository, with four years of community development, was removed without an archive.
• OpenRadioss was released under the AGPLv3, so the code can still be used, modified and shared. OpenCourant starts from the last publicly available code base and carries over the full commit history, so earlier contributors keep their attribution.
• OpenCourant is licensed under the AGPLv3 and will remain so. Since the fork it has moved continuous integration to its own infrastructure and started publishing stable packages.
• The RESF charter was written in response to projects changing licence or direction without their users having a say; Rocky Linux itself started after the change to CentOS Linux. Joining gives OpenCourant a vendor-neutral home under the same charter.

What incubation means

• An Incubator Project is accepted with the goal of becoming a full RESF Project. It has the Foundation's support, its members are RESF members, but it has no seat on the RESF Board of Directors yet.
• The status describes community, governance and processes, not the software, which has years of production use behind it.
• During incubation the RESF provides support, mentorship and guidance on governance, licensing and trademarks. The project works in public and reports to the RESF Board at least quarterly.

Requirements to graduate

• A community governance model, ideally involving former OpenRadioss maintainers, with enough people to form a Project Board under the RESF bylaws.
• Active committers from more than one organization, so no single company or individual controls the project.
• A documented, repeatable release process running on infrastructure the project controls.
• Tracked code provenance, AGPLv3 compliance and resolution of any naming or trademark questions.
• Graduation is decided by a vote of the RESF Board after a review of the project.

People and contacts

• Initial members: Brian Clemens (founder, RESF project mentor), Patrick Penner (founder, maintainer) and David Russell (maintainer).
• Former OpenRadioss users, contributors and maintainers are invited to join.
• Website and downloads at opencourant.org; source at github.com/OpenCourant/OpenCourant; forum on GitHub Discussions; chat in #opencourant on the Rocky Linux Mattermost; email [email protected]. Sponsorship enquiries go to [email protected].
• OpenCourant is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Siemens or Altair.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.