Benefits for customers and third parties

For customers and other entities in the Open CASCADE market, several benefits are perceived. These benefits have to be communicated to them, so that the real advantages that customers get with free software are perceived. Many of these benefits are generic of almost any free software product.

• Companies using it have more control on the product and development process:
  • They can now be sure that their specific development is based on a perennial, high quality, supported product. Even if Matra decides to discontinue the support of the software, the availability of source code ensures that third parties could provide such support.

  • They can influence the research and development of Open CASCADE, and even participate in it, since large parts of that process are being made with complete openness, and in collaboration with external contributors.

  • They can have an independent specific development strategy in a multi CAD, multi platform environment, using the parts of Open CASCADE that they prefer, but maintaining their own improvements.

• Independent software vendors have a more direct access to the base technology:
  • Entrance fee is low. In fact, it is almost zero, since the software can be studied and tested just by downloading it from the Net.
  • Advantage of the components added by the open source community. All those components are available to the vendor for incorporation into its products.
  • Influence the research and development of the product, by collaborating in the open development model.
  • Enhance their application maintainability, by having knowledge not only of the components they develop, but also from the core components supplied by Matra Datavision, since its source code is available.
  • Increase their notoriety through the component gallery.
• Entities devoted to research and education benefit mainly from the openness of the process:
  • They are able to completely disseminate and share research results, which is usually not possible if they are based on proprietary products.
  • Low adoption fee, since the code (and even binary packages ready to install) are available for free.
  • Availability of source code makes many research projects possible. This is the case, for instance, when modification of the existing code is necessary.