Recent History
After many years of Inventor being solely available under proprietary licensing from TGS (today, VSG - Visualization Sciences Group), it was released under the LGPL open source license in August 2000, which is available from SGI.
At approximately the same time, an API clone library called Coin3D was released by the company SIM (Systems in Motion). SIM was later acquired by the Kongsberg group and re-branded as Kongsberg SIM. The Coin library had been written in a clean room fashion from scratch, sharing no code with the original SGI Inventor library, but implementing the same API for compatibility reasons. Systems in Motion's Coin library is released under a dual licensing scheme, available both under the GNU GPL (for Free Software development) and a commercially sold license for proprietary software development.
The open source version from SGI is not currently maintained and SGI has not shown any commitment to do further development of the library. However, the open source release is the basis for several actively developed projects: the open-source eXtensible Imaging Platform (Siemens Corporate Research), and the freemium MeVisLab (Fraunhofer MeVis)
Kongsberg SIM's Coin library and TGS's Inventor are still thriving under active development, and both have added numerous improvements to the original Inventor API like extensive support for the VRML standard.
Despite its age, the Open Inventor API is still widely used for a wide range of scientific and engineering visualization systems around the world, having proven itself well designed for effective development of complex 3D application software.
Read more about this topic: Open Inventor
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